Latest news with #GirlfromtheNorthCountry
Powys County Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Powys County Times
Powys farmer reprising role in Bob Dylan 'Old Vic' musical
A Powys farmer has swapped the farmyard for the stage as he reprises his role in an Olivier and Tony award-winning musical now showing in London. Steffan Harri Jones says it is an "incredibly privilege" to make his debut at The Old Vic theatre, in the Great Depression-era musical Girl from the North Country which features songs written by legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The 33-year-old, who has performed in hit West End shows Shrek, Les Misérables and Spamalot, plays Elias Burke in the musical which runs until Saturday, August 23. 'I feel incredibly privileged to be making my debut at the Old Vic in London," Steffan said. "It's a theatre with such a rich legacy. "So many extraordinary artists have stood on that stage, and to now be a part of that history is both humbling and thrilling. 'I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity, and I'm approaching every moment with real joy and respect for the space, the story we're telling, and the people I get to share it with. 'Each show I've been a part of has shaped me in different and lasting ways. 'Performing in Les Misérables taught me the discipline and emotional depth that comes with being part of such an iconic and demanding show. 'Spamalot, on the other hand, gave me the freedom to play, to embrace spontaneity and comedy with confidence. 'And taking on the title role in Shrek the Musical was a real turning point. It challenged me physically and vocally but also allowed me to lead a company and find real heart in a larger-than-life character. Steffan was the youngest actor to play the role of Shrek. 'Each role has helped me grow, not just in skill, but in understanding how to connect with an audience and serve a story with honesty.' The former Caersws FC goalkeeper is taking a break from managing the family farm in Dolanog, near Llanfair Caereinion, alongside his wife and West End actress Rosie, to perform in Girl from the North Country. 'At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, my wife Rosie and I made the decision to leave London and return to the family farm," Steffan said. "It was a big change, but the right one for us. 'Together, we now manage the farm full-time, with the invaluable support of our family and friends. 'It's been both a challenging and rewarding journey, and we truly believe this area is the perfect place for our young son to grow up, surrounded by nature and a strong sense of community.'
Irish Post
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Post
Nichola MacEvilly talks art, activism, and why every Irish performer knows each other
NICHOLA MACEVILLY, from Sligo, trained in London, studying at Rose Bruford College and Central School of Speech and Drama. She is back in London currently in rehearsals for her latest show. Nichola MacEvilly (Pic: Jake Stewart) What are you up to? Right now I'm in rehearsals for Conor McPherson's Girl from the North Country at The Old Vic here in London. Have you worked with Conor McPherson before? I have indeed. Previously we brought Girl from the North Country to the Olympia in Dublin for six weeks before embarking on a 25 city tour of the UK. Conor's adored by everyone who is lucky enough to work with him. He's one of the greatest playwrights of our time, but he's also one of the best directors I've ever worked with. Most importantly he's very kind, and great craic. There are some other Irish actors in the play - have you worked together before? Colin Conor and I shared the Girl from the North Country stage before so it's great to be reunited with him. Myself and David Ganly had never worked together but we knew one another in that way all Irish actors know each other despite never having met. Great to finally work together. We also have a Tipperary man, James Berkery, as our associate movement director. Rehearsals for Girl From the North Country (Pic: Manuel Harlan) What is your favourite song in the show, and why? Oh, I couldn't pick a favourite but I do love Girl from the North Country as it's the one I get to sing myself. It's a haunting a cappella version arranged beautifully by Simon Hale. It underscores a particular moment in the show. A moment where light and dark, good and evil, reveal themselves simultaneously. I adore it. What led you into an acting career? There is a great theatre tradition in Sligo where I grew up and live. It wasn't uncommon for kids to recite Yeats poems and do Sean O'Casey plays at the Feis. We were very fortunate. I was very taken with theatre as a whole, and I suppose acting was where I landed within it all. I didn't have a eureka moment, or a calling to act. It's something that's settled with me over time. What is your favourite play? I've just developed a small obsession with Conor's new play The Brightening Air. I went to see it twice at The Old Vic, and bought the text. It's set in Sligo so I have a direct line to the world it's set within. It's a beautiful study of family, love, and the magical. I also love Tennessee Williams plays. I'd love to do Suddenly Last Summer one day. You were in a production last year with actor Brian Cox - what was that like? Yes we did Long Day's Journey into Night in the West End. Brian Cox is undoubtedly one of the finest actors of his generation. Eugene O'Neill's plays ask a lot of the actors who perform them, and Brian's character James Tyrone is one of the most iconic and challenging, so it was interesting to observe him navigate the challenges there. His contemporary Ian McKellen was doing Player Kings'in the Noel Coward behind us. The stage doors face each other so we had fun waving across every day. MacEvilly hails from Co. Sligo (Pic Anna Leask) What are your Irish roots? My dad was born in Sligo and my mum in Cavan Town. My mum is a Smyth from Main Street. They were living in Sligo when I was born but were visiting Cavan for Christmas when I decided to make my entrance on Stephens Day. I'm Sligo through and through but proud to have been born in Cavan like my mum's people. Where is your favourite theatre in Ireland? Hawks Well Theatre in Sligo. It was built by the people for the people. A number of the founders have passed away in recent years. We're very aware of their legacy. We owe them a lot. You will be playing Constance Markievicz later this year - tell us about that? Yes very excited about this. It's a project we've been working on for over 6 years. It's called Two Sisters and is created by Kellie Hughes with original compositions by Michael Rooney and Stephen Doherty. It's inspired by the two Gore Booth sisters Constance and Eva. It's a powerful blend of music, song, and spoken word adapted from their original texts and correspondence. It features myself and the singer Niamh Farrell with seven extraordinary musicians. Constance in particular has been unfairly represented in some cases I believe. We don't pass comment on that either way through the work but we do allow her own words and perspective to come through. What would you say has been your proudest moment on stage? Aside from Girl from the North Country of course, I'd have to say the first preview we did of Fun Home at The Gate Theatre in Dublin was a particularly memorable moment in time. The audience were invited members of the LGBTQI+ community and it was humbling to hear their audible reactions throughout the show. You could sense they were screaming 'Yes, I recognise myself in these characters'! It felt like an important moment in which our work had the potential to make a real impact on the lives of people who may ordinarily have felt excluded from the conversation. Which living person do you most admire? This changes regularly but the most consistent person has to be Mary Robinson. From her Irish presidency to her membership of The Elders, she has the ability to cut through the noise and speak with clarity and conviction without personal agenda or fear. What's the best advice you've ever been given? You didn't come this far just to come this far. What's the greatest lesson life has taught you? Be yourself, extremely and unapologetically. Your path is waiting for you when you truly believe that. Who/what is the greatest love of your life? My family and Smythy the dog. Girl from the North Country runs at London's Old Vic Theatre until August 23 See More: Girl From The North County
Time Out
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
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.
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Dylan said: teach me that!' Martin Carthy on six decades of Scarborough Fair – and his new solo album
Martin Carthy has returned to Scarborough Fair. It's been 60 years since he first recorded the song on his self-titled debut album, and famously taught it (or tried to teach it) to both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, when they came to watch the young guitar hero playing in the London folk clubs. Dylan transformed the song into Girl from the North Country, while Simon turned it into Scarborough Fair/Canticle, a hit single for Simon & Garfunkel and the opening track on their 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Carthy's new version is on Transform Me Then into a Fish, his first solo album in 21 years, released on his 84th birthday today. It now has sitar backing from Sheema Mukherjee, giving it a mysterious, spooky edge. 'That's the kind of a song it is. Try not to be scared of it,' said Carthy, whose sleeve notes when he first recorded the song provided a reminder that parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme were herbs traditionally associated with death. 'It finds a home among the weird, oddball songs. I was interested in what Sheema could do with it, and she responded as a wonderful musician will respond …' He is sitting at his kitchen table in the house in which he has lived for the past 37 years, in Robin Hood's Bay on the Yorkshire coast, just half an hour's drive north of Scarborough. It looks like an over-cluttered museum, with every space on the floor, walls or shelves packed with musical instruments, cassettes, pictures, posters and a street sign from Hull, where his wife, the late Norma Waterson, grew up. He now shares the home with their daughter, the folksinger and fiddle-player Eliza Carthy, her two children, and a cat. He says he has always loved the lyrics of folk songs as much as the melodies, and as he discusses the new album, he delights in telling stories, often illustrated with bursts of song, about the bands and musicians he has played with. Eliza brings in tea, chipping in about lyrics and song titles. The new album started out as a 60th anniversary tribute to his 1965 solo debut, but didn't quite work out that way. A handful of songs have been dropped, and three new ones added. But eight originals remain, including Scarborough Fair. He remembers exactly where he first heard it – at the Troubadour folk club in Earl's Court, in 1960, where it was sung by Jacqueline McDonald (of the Spinners fame) who told her audience that she had learned it from a new song book, The Singing Island, by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Carthy rushed out to buy it and thought: 'That's a nice tune – and of course it was, because Ewan wrote [this version of] it! He would always improve a tune.' Carthy composed his own arrangement for the song, and was singing it while playing with the Thamesiders at the King & Queen pub, near Goodge Street, when he 'found myself looking into Dylan's face – I had heard about him from Sing Out magazine'. Dylan was there with his legendary manager Albert Grossman, 'a folk fan who loved fishing and whaling songs and could sing the pants off anyone, though he never sang in public'. Dylan said he loved Scarborough Fair, and begged Carthy to 'teach me that, teach me that'. A few days later he came to watch Carthy playing solo at the Troubadour, and began visiting the house where he was living on Haverstock Hill, near Belsize Park tube. The first visit has become a folk legend. It was during the bitterly cold winter of 1962-3, and one of Carthy's friends had found an old piano abandoned outside Chalk Farm tube and pushed it up the hill to the house. Carthy started chopping it up with a sword he had been given as a Christmas present, so he could feed it into a wood-burning stove – to Dylan's fury. 'I got the sword and Bob came and stood in front of me and said 'you can't do that, man, it's a musical instrument!' 'It's a piece of junk', I said, and swung a couple of times. Bob was looking up at me and said 'could I try?' – and he battered it … it's all true!' Dylan failed to master Scarborough Fair. 'He wanted to do it with a flat pick though he's a perfectly good finger-style player,' says Carthy. 'He got the giggles all the time and it made him laugh.' So when Dylan later transformed the song into Girl from the North Country, did he mind? 'We just swapped songs all the time,' says Carthy. 'That's what people did.' Carthy was less pleased when Paul Simon did not credit him for his arrangement on Simon and Garfunkel's version, Scarborough Fair/Canticle. But all is now forgiven, with Carthy saying: 'It was grossly unfair [of me] because it wasn't a pinch in any way … it was written as a tribute because he is clever enough to do that.'' They made up by singing the song together on stage at Hammersmith Apollo in October 2000: 'He was doing a tour. He said, 'Really – you want to do that?' It was important, so I could lay it to rest and never have to sing that song again!' He eventually changed his mind about returning to the song, he said, because 'I was gifted a lovely version!' In 2014 he was invited to sing on a TV drama, Remember Me, set in Scarborough and starring Michael Palin. When he went to the recording, he was presented with a very different version of Scarborough Fair, 'collected by Cecil Sharpe, from Goathland – a village near here on the moors'. That's the one he recorded for the new album and now sings live 'but I haven't got it quite right yet …' Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Other songs of course have stories attached, too. He tells how he sang High Germany back in 1963 and thought he had remembered the words correctly until he checked the English Folk Music Journal and found that for some verses 'the words were nothing like mine – I was highly impressed I had invented this stuff'. He still sings his version. As for his own original version of the Ewan MacColl song Springhill Mine Disaster, The Ballad of Springhill, he says that MacColl, a folk purist, 'hated what I did, because I was playing guitar – a foreign body!' On the new version, Carthy is backed only by Eliza's fiddle and demonstrates his new singing voice. 'I lost a lot in the lower registers and found something else – and I like it.' Eliza's fiddle also provides the new setting for Ye Mariners All, 'one of those lovely nonsense songs.' The suitably surreal album cover for Transform Me Then into a Fish shows Martin at the breakfast table in the middle of the ocean, holding his fork like a crazed Neptune. Carthy has always been adventurous. After recording that landmark album in 1965 he worked with fiddler Dave Swarbrick. When Swarbrick joined Fairport Convention in 1969 – an invitation also extended to Carthy, 'twice!' – Carthy joined Steeleye Span instead, playing electric guitar, very loudly, saying 'do you want me to turn it down to 'lounge' – it's supposed to be loud!' After marrying Norma in 1972 he joined the glorious vocal group the Watersons. 'I thought eventually someone would teach me to sing, and Norma did,' he says. He went on to be involved in many different projects, including solo work, playing in duos with Swarbrick and with John Kirkpatrick and Eliza, and in groups including Waterson: Carthy (in which he was joined by Norma and Eliza), the brass-backed Brass Monkey, and the gloriously experimental the Imagined Village, which reworked traditional songs for a multicultural Britain, and featured a large cast that included Simon Emmerson, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah and Mukherjee. 'I loved it,' says Carthy. 'That huge band was so exciting. Sheema seized everything we tossed at her and she encouraged me to take risks.' With the Imagined Village, he recorded a powerful new treatment of the traditional My Son John in 2010, with sitar backing and updated to the Afghan war era with Carthy's new lyrics: 'Up come John and he's got no legs, he's got carbon fibre blades instead.' He startled his followers even more by re-working Slade's Cum on Feel the Noize: 'Because I'm a big fan of Noddy [Holder]. What a singer!' He's just home from a US tour with Eliza, with shows to celebrate the new album involving both Eliza and Sheema starting on 12 June – while next year promises the return of a new version of the Imagined Village. Carthy may be 84, but he's not slowing down. Transform Me Then into a Fish is out today on Hem Hem Records
RTÉ News
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Brendan Gleeson to make his return to the Irish stage
Brendan Gleeson is to make his return to the Irish stage for the first time in a decade in a new production of Conor McPherson's acclaimed play The Weir at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin this August. The Dublin actor will also make his West End debut when the play transfers to the Harold Pinter Theatre in London from 12 September to 6 December 2025. The Weir is at 3Olympia Theatre from 8 August to 6 September, with tickets, priced from €25 on sale Saturday 3 May at 12pm. This will be the first time McPherson, who has also written works such as The Brightening Air, Girl from the North Country and the movie I Went Down, will direct the play. The synopsis of The Weir reads, "On a stormy night, four local men gather in an isolated pub in rural Ireland. Their usual banter and everyday lives are disrupted by the arrival of a woman called Valerie. "The stories they weave to impress her are gripping, haunting and deeply unsettling. Little do they know that she has a profoundly personal story of her own, the sharing of which will leave them all shaken." Brendan Gleeson began his acting career in the late seventies with the Passion Project in Dublin's Project Arts Centre and has gone on to star in numerous movies, including The Banshees of Inisherin, In Bruges, Gangs of New York, the Harry Potter movies, Paddington 2, Braveheart, and The General. His TV credits include Mr. Mercedes, A Higher Loyalty, and Into the Storm. Speaking about appearing in The Weir, the actor said, "Conor McPherson's The Weir is one of the rarest plays around. The last time I appeared on stage was ten years ago, at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where I started my career. "I can't wait to be back there, and then to play in the West End for the first time, at the beautiful Pinter Theatre - and to work with Conor on his profoundly moving, inspiring and ultimately hopeful play." McPherson said, "I can hardly believe it's thirty years since I wrote The Weir - and about thirty years since I first met the wonderful Brendan Gleeson. "It's an absolute honour to bring this play to life again with one of the great titans of Irish acting. I'm hugely looking forward to directing my play for the very first time and sharing this production with audiences in Dublin and in London very soon." Co-producer Kate Horton added, "Along with a multitude of theatregoers, I was spellbound by Conor McPherson's play The Weir when it first premiered at the Royal Court. "I've since been granted three wishes; to have Conor agree to direct his own masterpiece for the first time, for the magnificent Brendan Gleeson to agree to lead the cast, and for the brilliant Anne Clarke to join me as co-producer. "Together, they are titans of Irish and International theatre. The Weir is a beautiful play about human connection, the endurance of hope and the essential power of storytelling. It will be a joy to share this production with audiences." The Weir had a critically acclaimed revival at The Abbey Theatre in 2022, with an ensemble cast featuring Downton Abbey star Brendan Coyle, who featured in the original London production of the show twenty-five years ago.
