2 days ago
Girl from the North Country
This review is from the original 2017 Old Vic run for Girl from the North Country, in July 2017. It returns to the theatre with a new cast in July 2025.
Whatever you do, don't call it the 'Bob Dylan musical'. Yes, the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman may have once described himself as 'a song and dance man'. But playwright-director Conor McPherson's bleak, Dylan-soundtracked 'Girl from the North Country' is a play with songs that avoids the trappings of musical theatre like the plague – there are no dance routines, no happy endings, and the Old Vic stage remains dimly lit and half-shrouded in darkness. Dylan himself had no creative input, but one assumes it was always implicit in his licensing of the songs that it wasn't ever going to be a big tits-and-teeth West End show with Bob's name in lights.
Taking place in the Dustbowl at the height of the Great Depression, 'Girl from the North Country' extracts the Steinbeckian strand from Dylan's oeuvre, and might be imagined as an extra story that didn't make Todd Haynes's haunting, Dylan-inspired film 'I'm Not There'.
It's set at an inn in Duluth, Minnesota (Dylan's hometown) in 1934. Nick Laine (Ciaran Hinds), the gruff owner of the establishment, has many problems, not least the apparent dementia of his wife Elizabeth, played by Shirley Henderson in a truly bewitching turn, intense, otherworldly, almost rockstar-like. The show is set entirely in the inn, and follows the Laines and their patrons, who range from Joe (Arinze Kene), an ex-con boxer looking to put his life back in order, to Stanley Townsend's Mr Burke, a member of the elite fallen on hard times, now drifting through the night with his crumbling family.
It's a compelling set of stories, albeit sketched broader than is typical of McPherson, but with a narrower scope than Dylan's freewheelin' lyrical oeuvre. It touches on a lot of issues – race, faith, disability, capitalism, justice, immigration – but never really interrogates any of them.
But there's still something powerful in their evocation. And of course, the show's real USP is the music. For the most part, these are not the tracks you'd expect: there's just a handful of big singles (though don't worry, we get a spine-tingling 'Like a Rolling Stone'), and despite the folky instrumentation, Dylan's actual folk era is almost ignored. But the arrangements – by Simon Hale – are ravishing, songs building through bare vocals then layered with fiddle and an omnipresent kick drum played by whichever member of the cast happens to be walking past. Certainly they more than make a case for Dylan's body of work. And to state the obvious, however oblique the song choices feel, they're considerably less oblique than what you get at a Dylan concert these days, and the singing is beautiful, especially from Henderson.
'Girl from the North Country' would feel imperfect and undersketched as either musical or play, but smush them together and you've got something. It's a mood piece, marrying the myths of Dylan and the Depression into something timeless and elegant – a stark evocation of the American firmament.
