Girl From The North Country, Old Vic review - Dylan's songs fail to lift the mood

Well, I wasn’t expecting a Dylanesque take on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" as an opening number and I was right. But The Zim, Nobel Prize ‘n all, has always favoured The Grim American Songbook over The Great American Songbook and writer/director Conor McPherson’s hit "play with music" leans into the poet of protest’s unique canon with his international smash hit, now back where it all began eight years ago.

It remains a curious and unique piece, at once overly familiar (take you pick from Williams, Steinbeck, Miller or even Chekhov as inspirations) but also continually surprising. The songs don’t tell the story, as they largely do in conventional musical theatre, instead they act as illustrations of mood, character and place, a little like dance's function in ballet. And, as happens at Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, I was caught expecting the action to stop so I could applaud a particularly impressive performance and for the singer to take a well-deserved bow. This approach may be an invigorating innovation in theatre, but it does bring its problems too.We’re in Duluth, Minnesota in the middle of the Hungry Thirties, just a few years before Dylan was born in that very town. The Great Depression is hitting folks, work hard to come by, banks foreclosing mortgages and hope, like many of the town’s young men, catching a train to New York or a ship to Chicago. In a rundown boarding house, a group of misfits have been flung together by the chaos of cold-hearted capitalism and, either side of a chilly Thanksgiving, see their lives changed forever.

Nick Laine (a wisecracking Colin Connor) runs the joint while conducting a barely concealed affair with a resident widow, Mrs Neilsen (Maria Omakinwa), who is expecting an inheritance "once the legal side is sorted out" - a nod to a Dickens trope. Nick’s wife, Elizabeth, suffers from early onset dementia, his son, Gene has hit the bottle as his short stories and poems hit the spike, and his adopted, black teenage daughter, Marianne, is pregnant, father unknown. Meanwhile, another family, the Burkes, is living upstairs in reduced circumstances, a husband and wife coping – just about – with a son who has learning difficulties and a quick temper. When two drifters arrive in the middle of the night, one an unlikely Bible salesman (Eugene McCoy), the other a black guy with a prizefighter’s rolling gait, the fragile equilibrium is upset, never to be righted again.

The seeds of the play’s problems lie in that cavalcade of characters (and that’s not all of them!) To get that range of humanity into the story, in addition to 20-odd songs that sit alongside rather than drive the narrative, real people are reduced to sketches, to stereotypes, to references to other characters seen in other plays or movies. They’re just not with us long enough to engage us fully, the power of poignancy diminished as we’re only halfway-invested in their fates. This is despite the very fine actors who do so much with often little more than dramatic scraps.

This is particularly so for Justina Kehinde (pictured above) as Marianne, whose early "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)” is the first of those showstoppers that didn’t stop the show, and Sifiso Mazibuko as Joe, the lost soul boxer (who is also a magnificent vocalist). We can see that they’re meant for each other, but their story is squeezed by too long an exposition of Nick’s attempt to marry her off to a much older, wealthy shoemaker (Teddy Kempner) – a storyline from Fiddler on the Roof. There’s little room for subtlety in developing Marianne’s seizing control of her life because it happens so swiftly.

Subtlety is in short supply too in the portrayal of Elizabeth's mental illness. Katie Brayben is as marvellous as ever in the role, but her no-filter outbursts gain awkward laughs in the house leavened by awkward scowls. Post cost of living crisis, post Covid, we’ve become much more sensitive to the impact of economic turmoil on mental health and "the funny" just isn’t there any more – or not to the same extent. The comic relief in a pretty relentlessly miserable tale has been diluted in eight short years. leaving the play imbalanced.

Alcoholism and learning difficulties are also presented as one-dimensional – the first paralysing Nick's son Gene, the second an affliction that tears the Burke family apart, ultimately tragically so. Colin Bates and Stefan Harri do what they can with the roles, but they just don’t have enough to work with to escape those straitjackets.  

For some, perhaps most, of its audience, the opportunity to hear Dylan’s songs played gloriously by Simon Hale’s wonderful band and sung with verve and feeling by excellent singers often in harmony, will be more than enough reason to see the production. Others will be captivated by the reinvention of musical theatre, specifically its jukebox genre, drawing on other formats and great plays of the past. 

Yet, some, including your reviewer, will find the compromises detract from the whole, the gaps in the collage too gaping, the meat in the sandwich too thin. It’s not a complete unknown as to why this somewhat claustrophobic play succeeded, but I was knock, knock, knocking on the Old Vic’s door to be let out into reviving fresh air at the curtain.

• Girl From The North Country at the Old Vic until 23 August
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk