'Girl from the North Country' review — Bob Dylan's music is the crowning glory of this impressionistic show

Read our review of Girl from the North Country, written and directed by Conor McPherson, now in performances at the Old Vic to 23 August.

Like, well, a rolling stone, Girl from the North Country has covered a lot of ground since its 2017 debut at the Old Vic. That original production transferred to two separate West End theatres and was seen off Broadway and on, along the way racking up Olivier and Tony nominations, alongside the occasional award.

And here writer-director Conor McPherson’s impressionistic slice of 1930s American life is once again, as refracted through the alternately mournful and tangy musical prism of Bob Dylan, whose songbook provides the score – scintillatingly orchestrated and arranged by the show’s musical director, Simon Hale. He more than anyone is arguably the unsung genius of the occasion, and won a 2022 Tony for his efforts.

The music is the evening’s self-evident glory: a refresher course in the extraordinary output of the 2016 Nobel laureate who has gained a further perch in the culture of late via the recent, much-laureled biopic, A Complete Unknown, with Timothée Chalamet as the sulky musical savant. And how wonderful it is to hear afresh “Forever Young”, for instance, which is very much the sung equivalent of its title as delivered by the protean Katie Brayben, having recently braved Broadway as Tammy Faye in the Elton John musical of the same name.

A hunched, crabbed presence doing rather overwrought battle in the book scenes with her character’s wayward psyche, Brayben is vocally second-to-none, and benefits from getting some of the better-known songs, “Like a Rolling Stone” included. There’s equal pleasure to be found in the 1980 gospel number “Pressing On”, here pressed into use as an ensemble piece led from the front by Maria Omakinwa’s 40-something widow, Mrs Neilsen.

“Duquesne Whistle”, the opening track on the 2012 album Tempest, is handed to a white-clad, dramatically spotlit Steffan Harri as the indrawn Elias Burke, who finds a glory in song denied to the character in speech. (Elias is the mentally challenged son of a down-on-his-luck businessman and his embittered wife, here played by David Ganly and Rebecca Thornhill.)

The story itself flits amongst the denizens of a boarding house in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, as narrated, we discover, from beyond the grave. That itself accords with McPherson’s interest in the supernatural as we will be reminded in the autumn when his best-known play, The Weir, returns to the West End: a ubiquitous presence of late, he also penned the previous tenant at the Vic, The Brightening Air, and is spearheading the epic stage iteration of The Hunger Games due in the autumn, as well.

You admire McPherson’s ability to keep nearly 20 stories on the boil simultaneously. The author’s own direction, complemented by Lucy Hind’s movement, allows the focus to shift from individual studies in love and loss and pain to groupings often dramatically silhouetted by Mark Henderson’s poetic lighting.

That said, I was aware this time around of a bittiness to the storytelling that wasn’t apparent first time round, alongside a sense that the cast were each contributing attention-grabbing turns rather than coalescing into the seamless whole of the original, which brought Oliviers to Shirley Henderson and the tremendous Sheila Atim. Justina Kehinde is a quieter presence in Atim's onetime part as the pregnant Marianne, the adopted Black daughter of white parents, Elizabeth and Nick Laine – played by Brayben and Colin Connor, respectively.

Individual moments capture the attention as Rae Smith’s sepia-hued sets slide into place, and there’s no denying the ability of the company to bring an audience to its feet. But eight years hasn’t on this occasion ripened the original – proof positive that, in art as often as in life, you can’t go home again.

Girl from the North Country is at the Old Vic to 23 August. Book Girl from the North Country tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Girl from the North Country (Photos by Manuel Harlan)