Girl From the North Country – Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury and Touring

Picture: Johan Persson

Girl From the North Country continues until 20 August 2022 and then tours until 18 March 2023.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

It’s hard not to be seduced by the quality of the music in this show. Simon Hale’s arrangements of 20 Bob Dylan songs (dating from 1963 to 2012) are sensitive, evocative and beautiful.

Everyone in the cast, several of whom are actor-musicians, sings strikingly well. And the on-stage band, The Howlin’ Winds, catches every wistful nuance. Ruth Elder is an outstanding fiddle player.

And yet… Conor McPherson’s plot is clumsy, tiresomely episodic and shot through with undeveloped subplots. Reliance on a narrator to fill in the gaps is a weak device too.

Nick Laine (Colin Connor) and his wife Elizabeth (Frances McNamee) are running a bankrupt guest house in Minnesota in 1934. She has dementia – one of the many sub-plots – which McNamee portrays very convincingly.

Another subplot is that their adopted daughter (Justina Kehinde – excellent singing voice) is pregnant – father unknown – and their son (Gregor Milne) wants to be the next Ernest Hemingway so he can’t/won’t get a job.

Then there’s the widow upstairs (Keisha Amponsa Banson) with whom Nick is in a relationship, a boxer (Joshua C Jackson) who has served a prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit and a Bible salesman on the make (Eli James).

Also present are a couple whose adult son has learning difficulties, a suicidal doctor who acts as narrator and so it goes on – and on – for two and a half hours.

Money is a main theme because – this is 1934, just five years after the Wall Street Crash after all – everyone is short of it.

And no one is happy. Dylan isn’t, of course, renowned for cheerful optimistic songs and nearly every character in this show is disturbed, anxious, miserable or all of those things and it makes for a lot of sameiness without much dramatic contrast.

I didn’t care for the occasional surreality much either. One minute we’re hearing that poor Elias (Ross Carswell), mentally stuck in infancy, has perished in an accident on the shore and the next he’s on stage in a brightly lit white suit belting out ‘Duquesne Whistle’ with full chorus.

There are however some memorable and moving moments: McNamee singing, with gentle but incisive poignancy, ‘Has Anyone Seen My Love?’ with the band at the side of the stage and the ensemble silhouetted behind her is one such. And there are others.

Rae Smith’s set gives us flown walls and interiors and some effective upstage projection, all imaginatively and sombrely lit by Mark Henderson.

It’s just a pity that this show is so disjointed and so unrelentingly miserable.

Susan Elkin