Bob Dylan’s songs as never before
Girl from the North Country Old Vic
Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records. His impact in popular culture is beyond reckoning. He’s up there with the all-time great singer-songwriters. Oh, yes, and he just got that Nobel Prize in Literature. When a new piece of musical theatre lands that derives from his backcatalogue and comes with his blessing (his people first approached Irish playwright Conor Mcpherson and gave him the go-ahead, albeit Bob has yet to take any kind of look at the result), you bow low and give thanks, don’t you?
Well, in the case of an earlier attempt to make Dylan’s work sing, in a theatrical context, for its supper – the 2006 Twyla Tharp-directed The Times They Are a-changin’ – even the mass devotion that attends the star wasn’t enough to save it. It was dubbed a “spectacle of torture” by the New York Times and folded fast on Broadway.
Ingrate that I am, I confess to being a mite underwhelmed by this valiant and undeniably accomplished effort to do something more oblique with songs that will outlive us all. Mcpherson, whose early sensation The Weir is reason enough for eternal gratitude, has shepherded 20 tracks – most of them not obvious choices (you can go whistle for Blowin’ in the Wind) – into a populous, ethereal play that combines the grit of the Great Depression with something numinous and mysterious.
His instincts seem correct. If you don’t try to express the spiritual quality of this reclusive hipster-poet – sage, seeker, keeper of America’s soul, what you will – no matter how robust the songs, they risk sounding ordinary when separated from the man himself. But in finding a means to channel such a potentially intimidating source, Mcpherson lets the shadow of other influences fall too heavily.
The initial route into Girl from the North Country – set in a struggling guesthouse in Dylan’s birth town of Duluth, Minnesota, in winter 1934 – was Eugene O’neill. So we get shades of Long Day’s Journey into Night in the fraught family set-up of Ciarán Hinds’s work-sapped proprietor Nick, his unloving wife Elizabeth, afflicted by dementia (in contrast to the drugaddled Mary Tyrone) and a restless, would-be writer son called, yeah, Gene.
Among the thinly sketched guests, there’s a couple whose simple-witted son has attacked a girl in the woods, a nod – voluntary or otherwise – to Of Mice and Men. And the meta-theatrical approach, with Ron Cook’s amiable old Dr Walker taking to a retro mic-stand to introduce these folk, is redolent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938).
The evening has a distinct air of déjà vu about it, then. Yet you won’t have heard Dylan’s music this way before: sans whine, sans drawl, sliding in and out of the action, connecting, after a fashion, with characters’ sorrowful states, soloists at times surrounded by striking choric clusters. Mcpherson, who also directs, creates a pleasingly folksy ambience, with the musicians intruding into the low-lit, barely furnished scheme of things. There are moments of almost evangelical rapture, particularly at the start of the second half (You Ain’t Going Nowhere heralding an outbreak of Thanksgiving jiving) and there’s a sublime rendition of Forever Young that helps bring the tale to a will-o’-the-wisp end. In between, much intermittent brilliance, but it’s no full-on Bobby dazzler.