Girl From The North Country review: It is still an essential outing for Bob Dylan fans

Girl From The North Country

Gielgud Theatre, London                                 Until February 1, 2hrs 30mins

Rating:

First seen in 2017 and now back after a New York run, this play that’s almost a musical features 20 songs by Bob Dylan. Bob, the story goes, approached the Irish dramatist Conor McPherson, who also directs, and offered him his entire song book. 

What a gift.

The selection is largely lesser-known Dylan – from 1963 to 2012 – but studded with old hits such as Hurricane, Idiot Wind and Like A Rolling Stone. All are sung by a cast in a Depression-era setting of despair and had the cumulative effect, when I first saw it, of gouging your heart out of your chest.

But there’s a distinct dropping off in this revival. The overall emotional impact is now more room-temperature, the male casting weaker, the second half a teeny bit dull. It is still great to hear the music – played by the ensemble in Simon Hale’s lovely, floating arrangements – but the project feels less striking.

The action occurs in a rooming house in Duluth, Minnesota (Dylan’s home town), in 1934. ‘Pain comes in all kinds: physical, spiritual and indescribable,’ we are told in the opening narration. 

And indeed every kind of human suffering hoves into view, highlighted by the Nobel Prize-winner’s plangent, intensely American lyrics.

Nick (Donald Sage Mackay) is the loser who runs this flop house while caring for his dementia-afflicted wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben – a terrific vocalist). It’s on his premises that the various stories emerge, of his boozed-up writer son, a boxer on the run, a dodgy Bible salesman and a couple with a learning-disabled son. 

Of the new cast, I’d single out Nick’s pregnant daughter, played by Gloria Obianyo, whose rendition of I Want You is sensational.

It’s still an essential outing for Dylan fans – but it’s no longer knocking on heaven’s door quite so loudly.

 

Fairview

Young Vic, London                                                 Until January 23, 1hr 30mins

Rating:

This may not be the best drama of the year but it’s certainly divisive. It has a sitcom-like start, a surreal middle and a bombshell ending – one that the theatre is beseeching critics not to reveal.

It’s about an affluent black American family. Mum (Nicola Hughes) is peeling carrots for grandma’s big party; her hubby is trying to calm her; her irritating sister won’t eat dairy; and her student daughter demands a gap year. 

It’s amusing, unthreatening and vividly performed.

But African-American playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury torpedoes the cosiness by upending theatrical convention and confronting the audience with its whiteness. The play is sparkily directed by Nadia Latif, but by the end I felt it was essentially a gussied-up racial-awareness seminar with a grossly manipulative ending. 

Others will love it as a bold conceptual drama.

Certainly, for guilty, white liberals, Fairview offers surprises and self-flagellation galore.