An undated picture of singer Darius Danesh as Rhett Butler and actress Jill Paice as Scarlett ’Hara in the musical Gone With The Wind. (AP)

Scarlett ’Hara: Southern belle, feminist icon, West End star. The vain, feisty heroine of Gone With The Wind is all that and more in a musical stage adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s US Civil War saga that opens in London on Wednesday.

Directed by Trevor Nunn and starring American actress Jill Paice as Scarlett and British singer Darius Danesh as her sparring partner and love interest Rhett Butler, the show has a big budget, a big cast, big ambitions — and, if you believe the rumours, big problems.

Gone With the Wind is the latest attempt to make musical theatre from a much-loved literary work, following triumphs like Les Miserables and troubled productions like The Lord of the Rings. It has book, music and lyrics by Margaret Martin, a Los Angeles-based writer with a doctorate in public health who has never before had a play produced professionally. But if she is worried, she doesn’t show it.

Martin, 54, is a former teenage single mother who went back to university in her 30s and emerged a decade later with a PhD in community health science and a desire to do “the most fun thing I could think of doing” — writing a stage musical.

The fact that she was “a middle-aged woman with no track record in professional theatre” did not daunt her. “I thought, what story does everyone know in America?” Martin said. “And when Gone With the Wind came into my mind, I never thought I wouldn’t be doing it. The only question I had was the rights,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

After spending two years writing the play and recording demos of songs, Martin managed to persuade Mitchell’s estate to let her have the rights to the story. She persuaded Nunn — whose credits range from Cats to an acclaimed production of King Lear starring Ian McKellen — to direct after reading that he had an interest in US history.

Millions know Gone With the Wind from the 1939 film, which starred Vivien Leigh as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett. An epic tale of love and war filmed in glorious Technicolor, it smashed box-office records, won 10 Academy Awards, and remains one of the best-loved films of all time. Martin says she stuck more closely to Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, finding many modern-day resonances in its portrait of the 19th-century South.