The classic Hollywood epic Gone With the Wind is bound for London's West End next year.

A stage adaptation of the U.S. Civil War-era tale is being produced by British director Trevor Nunn, whose credits range from heading up the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre to helming Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals like Cats and Sunset Boulevard.

Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in a scene from the 1939 Hollywood classic Gone With The Wind. The Margaret Mitchell tale is set to debut as a new West End musical next year.
(Associated Press)

"Having now worked on adapting two vast novels for the stage, Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables, I am drawn to the challenge of telling Margaret Mitchell's epic story through words, music and the imaginative resources of the theatre," Nunn said in a statement.

No casting for the new musical has yet been announced, but the show is expected to open at the New London Theatre in spring 2008.

The production, which has been in the works for three years, will "remain true to Margaret Mitchell's original story and characters while also revealing its relevance to our lives today," producer Aldo Scrofani said. Composer and lyricist Margaret Martin will make her musical theatre debut with the production.

Based on Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the 1939 film starred Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh as wealthy southerners whose idyllic lives are turned upside down by the American Civil War. Gone With the Wind went on to win 10 Academy Awards and has since become one of North America's best-loved movies of all time.

Gone With the Wind previously inspired a Tokyo stage production called Scarlett in 1970. That show was adapted for the London stage two years later.