Having premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 – and gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway – Girl From the North Country has lost none of its potency as it returns to the theatre where it all began — a dreamy, sepia-soaked production of character-driven vignettes and reimagined Bob Dylan songs.
It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s actual birthplace – and the Great Depression is chewing through the soul of the town. At the centre of this dustbowl drama is the Laine family, struggling to keep their guesthouse (and each other) from crumbling under debt, loss, and the weight of time.
Nick Laine (Colin Connor) is a man burdened by a bubbling anger — the same kind that seems to course through the town — while his wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben) floats between madness and sudden, unnerving clarity. Their adopted Black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde) is pregnant, unmarried, and navigating her place within the world. Their house is a revolving door of boarders: hustlers, dreamers, a smooth-talking preacher, and a boxer down on his luck (think 1930s sitcom).
The 23-strong company moves fluidly between character, chorus, and live band. Simon Hale’s arrangements of 20 Dylan songs float in the spaces between joy and hardship. Stripped-back renditions of ‘Forever Young’ and ‘I Want You’ drift through wood-panelled walls and empty whisky bottles. Some numbers are so radically reimagined you’ll barely recognise them — like Brayben’s raw, ragged and impossibly controlled version of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. This cast is, across the board, a triple-threat ensemble that makes singing, playing, and acting all at once look annoyingly effortless.
Writer and director Conor McPherson frames the action like faded photographs: silhouettes moving behind gauze as Rae Smith’s set and lighting by Mark Hendersen conjures windswept roads with grainy projections flickering above the stage. The whole production is beautifully designed and sharply executed with transitions so smooth you barely notice them.
There’s real humour too – in the timing, the delivery, and the absurdity of it all. It’s very much a ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’ kind of situation. The second half ratchets up both the celebration and the grief. Connections splinter, and the ending comes quickly and lands heavily, giving the sense that there are just too many characters, with not quite enough tying them together.
That said, McPherson and Dylan are both masters of the poetic unsaid. Together, they create a world that feels like the inside of an old jukebox: full of half-remembered stories, crackling melancholy, and music that never quite stops playing.
