21Dylansongsintegratedto reflectcharacters’softpsyches

For all of the production’s electronic wizardry, though, its most striking feature was van Hove’s wildly innovative contribution to the notion of radical theatrical hospitality: The entire right-hand side of the Lyttleton Theater stage was occupied by a working restaurant van Hove called Foodwork. Dining ticket-holders paid for an elaborate meal that went on throughout the intermissionless performance.

The other high point of the week for me was Girl From the North Country, which ended its West End stay last week. Playwright Conor McPherson composed the script and directed this play with music, which reveals the intersecting lives of financially struggling transients in a Duluth boarding house of the 1930s. Accompanied by the actors taking turns playing guitar, fiddle, piano, bass and drums, 21 Dylan songs are interspersed, not so much to assist in the storytelling but to help define the spiritual and emotional bonds of these desperate, hurting people.

Slow Train, I Want You, Went to See the Gypsy and, of course, Like a Rolling Stone are all performed, and so are a whole passel of songs Dylan has written later in his career. The extraordinary contributions by musical director Alan Berry, orchestrator Simon Hale and movement director Lucy Hind elevate these musical moments to ecstatic levels.

The setting, for instance, of Dylan’s 2012 song Duquense Whistle is so startlingly affecting (as sung by Jack Shalloo, portraying a young man of diminished mental capacity) that you’ll be hard-pressed not to reach immediately for the tissues.

The veneer of Midwestern stoicism, and the aura of trouble surrounding the gallery of characters, vanish as cast members erupt into all manner of harmony. Every actor gets an arresting turn, but the ones I recall most poignantly are supplied by Sheila Atim, as the foundling daughter of the innkeepers; Shirley Henderson, playing her damaged mother; Claudia Jolly, as a discarded young lover; Arinzé Kene, as a man on the run from the law; and Bronagh Gallagher, portraying a woman trapped in a spiral of bad fortune. Dark souls never sang with more lightness of being.