Review: Girl from the North Country at York Theatre Royal

Girl from the North Country is not just another jukebox musical. It is a powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre crafted by Connor McPherson around the songs of Bob Dylan.

McPherson has re-imagined Dylan’s legendary songs and created a brilliantly constructed 1930’s musical where the songs do not drive the plot they just fit seamlessly into it and enhance the action.

The story is set in a guest house in Dylan’s home town of Duluth in Minnesota in 1934 in the middle of the great Depression and seven years before the songwriter was born.

The run down guesthouse setting brings a broad range of society together, particularly as the Depression levelled economic, if not racial differences.

It is owned by Nick and Elizabeth, who has dementia and is facing foreclosure. Their son is a drunken would-be writer whilst their adopted black daughter is pregnant and unpartnered.

Other wayward souls are interspersed in the story including a wrongly imprisoned boxer, a widow, a dubious preacher, another stricken family with a son who has never grown up and a morphine taking doctor. All are standing at the turning point of their lives, they realise nothing is what it seems. But as they search for a future, and hide from the past, they find themselves facing unspoken truths about the present.

The songs are drawn from right across Dylan’s back catalogue including ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ ‘Hurricane’ ‘Make You Feel My Love’ and ‘Forever Young’. Actors pick up instruments and play with the onstage band and step up to microphones singing directly to the audience which adds another dimension to McPherson’s work. An incredibly talented cast of 19 sing, dance but above all create and sustain some amazing and believable characterizations accompanied by a great on stage band. Frances McNamee as Elizabeth, the dementia suffering wife, is outstanding and utterly convincing in every way in a difficult role whilst as Mrs Neilsen the widow Keisha Amponsa Banson is powerful in the vocals and injects some lightness into the plot.

At York Theatre Royal to September 10 then at Alhambra Bradford (November 28-December 3) and Lyceum Sheffield (January 17-21)