When Girl from the North Country premiered at the Old Vic in the summer of 2017, no-one, your critic included, had seen anything like it. Conor McPherson’s shimmering interweaving of the songs of Bob Dylan into a story of hardscrabble American lives during the Great Depression was one of the most moving and memorable pieces of theatre I had experienced, with a final number so transcendently fine it took me several post-show minutes to compose myself afresh. The work, unsurprisingly, subsequently went on to wow both the West End and Broadway, as well as myriad international audiences.
And now it’s back at the place where the magic started, with McPherson once again directing a 20-strong ensemble of actors and musicians to bring us the story of a run-down boarding house in Dylan’s own hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, in the winter of 1934. Nick Laine (Colin Connor) runs the joint, which is on the brink of being repossessed, and a ragtag group of guests come and go, occasionally paying their bills.
Nick’s fearsomely straight-talking wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben) is suffering from some form of dementia, his wannabe writer son Gene (Colin Bates) has taken to drink and his adopted daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde) is 19, unwed and pregnant.
What struck me most forcefully about this fresh iteration of the show was its tendency towards dark humour rather than pathos and gravitas, which is a considerably less effective tactic. The sense of time and place is not quite so immaculately evoked and the monumental finale, a heartbreaking rendition of “Forever Young” by Elizabeth, has been supplanted by the group number “Pressing On”.
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Nonetheless, there is still an enormous amount to admire, not least the powerful and haunting singing of Brayben. Kehinde is graceful, stately and fiercely level-headed as Marianne, a young black woman in a largely white community, considers her predicament, and we reflect once more upon the veracity of McPherson’s claim that Dylan’s songs serve “as inner portraiture of the characters and their unexpressed, unseen emotional world”.
Sometimes this felicitous connection is covert, whereas at other junctures it is gloriously explicit. When Gene’s long-suffering girlfriend Kate (Lydia White) finally decides that enough is enough, the pair launch into a plangent take on “I Want You”, the two of them standing some distance apart and each in their own solitary spotlight. One of the show’s earliest numbers, “TIght Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)”, serves as the perfect introduction to Marianne’s situation.
Cavils aside, this remains a very special piece of theatre and I would urge anyone to catch McPherson’s own production of his work before it disappears for ever.
To 23 August, Old Vic Theatre, London (0344 871 7628, oldvictheatre.com)
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