17-07-2025
Like a rolling stone, the marvellous Girl From The North Country has rocked back up at the Old Vic theatre...and 8 years on, it's even better than the first time round, says Georgina Brown
Girl From The North Country (Old Vic, London)
Verdict: Knocking on Heaven's Door
Rating:
Conor McPherson's play set in 1930's depression era America is thrice blessed: by McPherson's extraordinary talent as a writer and director for creating a mood; by a remarkable ensemble of actors-singers-dancers playing the failures, fugitives and afflicted who inhabit his play; and by a soundtrack of 23 of Bob Dylan 's songs. He is the only playwright whom Dylan has favoured with such an opportunity.
Beautifully integrated and transformed by Simon Hale's bewitching arrangements, the music seems to express the near inexpressible emotions of lost souls blowing in the wind.
Revived at the Old Vic, where it started life in 2017, it is even more potent this time round. Back then, we wondered if it would work. Now we know it's a work of wonder.
McPherson gathers his misfits in a run-down boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota.
Best known for his haunting play, The Weir, he has a feel for lives trailed by the ghosts of dreams turned to dust.
On Rae Smith's sepia-toned set, hotelier Nick (Colin Connor) is preparing stew for his guests, all in a rut or on the run.
Dementia has robbed his wife Elizabeth of all inhibitions. An outstanding Katy Brayben sings like an angel, stamps like a rock star and dances like a whirling dervish.
Meanwhile, Nick is failing to persuade his teenage pregnant black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde, marvellous) to accept a 70-year-old widower's offer of marriage.
His wannabe-writer son Gene is drowning in rejection slips and drink.
His widowed mistress (sparkling Maria Omakinwa) is plotting a way out.
The respectable couple with a simple son are hiding something.
There's nothing godly about Eugene McCoy's Bible-seller - but there's a true gentleness about Sifiso Mazibuko's once award-winning boxer.
The first half finishes with a beautiful, heart-chilling, choral rendition of Like A Rolling Stone but this time, unlike the original production, the evening ends with a redemptive Moving On.
Special, and not to be missed.
Girl From The North Country is at the Old Vic until August 23.
Nye (Olivier, National Theatre)
Verdict: The end is Nye
Rating:
The end is Nye for Rufus Norris as Artistic Director of the National Theatre. His legacy show is a relaunch of last year's play by Tim Price starring Welsh superman Michael Sheen as the Welsh Labour politician Aneurin Bevan — the man who pushed through the foundation of the NHS after the Second World War.
It commemorates his life, by recreating key scenes from it, while Nye hallucinates on morphine following surgery for a peptic ulcer in 1959. (The surgery revealed that he was actually dying of cancer.)
Price has tweaked the play somewhat but it remains a two-hour 40-minute piece of high-spirited political hagiography.
We learn of early experience fighting a speech impediment in an 'I am Spartacus' moment of school room collective action. You could even call it class war.
But Nye really finds his voice in Tredegar Council, before becoming the Member for Ebbw Vale in Parliament and getting up the nose of both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.
At one point, the ghost of his father takes him down the mines to show him how to bring down the most coal by 'striking' in the right place.
With Sheen wearing pyjamas throughout, and the huge green hospital curtains of Vicki Mortimer's stage design acting as veils of consciousness, Norris's production is certainly ingenious.
Yet its invention masks a deeply nostalgic and deferential attitude. What could have been a coruscating indictment of today's low-alcohol left feels more like an obsequious and sentimental epitaph.
National Theatre, London, until August 16; Wales Millennium Centre August 22-30.
