Review: GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY, The Old Vic

It’s hard to shake the suspicion that this revival of Conor McPherson’s Girl From the North Country is hitching a ride on the gravy train of A Complete Unknown. Forged with songs from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, it feels less like living, breathing musical theatre that burrows into the heart, and like more a canny cash cow that fresh legions of Dylan disciples (and Chalamet obsessives) can to mumble along to.

McPherson toys slyly with the Dylan myth, setting this jukebox musical in Duluth, Minnesota, the town Dylan fans will clock as the birthplace of Robert Zimmerman. Bob Dylan came later. In Girl From the North Country, McPherson stitches together a collage of the world that birthed the man and the music that reshaped him with Dylan’s music soulfully reverse-engineered to suit the period. Each tune is reimagined with gospel shade - and bluesy undertones tease out the weary longing, heavy-eyed dreams, and dust-choked desires of its characters.

The flimsy but functional plot is a series of vignettes with Dylan’s music stitching it together. Grouchy Nick runs a crumbling guest house with the bank breathing down his neck. His dementia-suffering wife, Elizabeth, drifts in and out of lucidity firing sharp-tongued barbs at their guests. Their son is an aspiring but alienated writer, full of words but anchored by his family and love for a soon to be married woman. Nick’s adopted black daughter longs for a life beyond Duluth, though the shadows of Civil War-era racism still linger. She forms an uneasy but tender bond with a washed-up boxer, a coy set-up for a pulsating rendition of "Hurricane", Dylan’s real life ode to Rubin Carter.

But the emotional force is dampened by narrative convenience. None of McPherson’s characters are granted depth to grow beyond platitudinous dialogue and melodrama. You can tell from a mile away that McPherson has carefully moulded the narrative around Dylan’s music like a scaffold. Revelations land with a dull thud rather than mellow with psychological resonance, all to introduce the next song.

While it has its moments, reliant on Dylan’s Nobel Prize winning lyricism, there’s a fundamental artificiality to its vision of a Depression era backwater. Bob Dylan was always an outsider to the very Americana he so evocatively conjured, the freight train troubadour peering through the dusty windows of a bygone land. Girl From the North Country extends the distance through McPherson’s montage: it’s an outsider’s take on an outsider’s vision. Nostalgia twice removed. Steinbeck Kitsch. You half expect tumbleweed to blow across the stage. One of the spiralling subplots even seems unapologetically borrowed from Of Mice and Men.

But the music is so obviously good that it carries it. The cast blast out tunes from the depth of their lungs. Katie Brayben goes all guns blazing for her rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone". Sit back and let Dylan do the heavy lifting. As the big man sung: "Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright."

Girl From the North Country plays at The Old Vic until 23 August