This show has it all. It’s written (and directed) by arguably Ireland’s finest playwright of his generation, Conor McPherson. Set in a rooming house in Duluth, Minnesota in 1934, it’s a determined ensemble piece with a stellar cast including both established McPherson alumni (Ciarán Hinds, Jim Norton, Ron Cook, Bronagh Gallagher, Stanley Townsend) and new arrivals with reputations of their own (Shirley Henderson, Arinzé Kene). It touches not just on personal relationships but the grinding economic hardships of the Great Depression and the period’s still brutal racism. It has songs... more, it has songs by a Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan (who was born in Duluth in 1941), ranging from the 1963 title number to 2012’s “Duquesne Whistle”. (Curiously, the album that provides most numbers is Infidels from 1985.) It has everything imaginable going for it. Why, then, did it leave me not by any means cold but little better than room temperature?

I think it’s a combination of factors. Since his earliest monologues, McPherson’s dramas have always been founded on character rather than event: his best-known work The Weir is on the face of it just some people sitting talking in a pub. Here he has written over a dozen principal characters and tried to give them all a fair crack of the whip. But his scrupulously low-key writing lets him down: it threatens to feel like the first reel of a disaster movie, introducing each of the victims before the disaster strikes... then introducing them some more... and the catastrophe never happens (until an avalanche of mortality in the closing few minutes). A disaster movie sans disaster, or even a TV soap. Yet McPherson the director tends towards unshowy physicality but slightly over-projected vocal delivery, with Hinds in particular veering towards plain shouty. It feels stagey and a little distant.

This is perhaps because the actors are miked for the songs (backed by a quartet of acoustic musicians, plus whoever can be spared to wield the drum-brushes). These numbers, however, aren’t integrated into the action; they’re not “sung dialogue”, as it were, but are delivered as performances, facing the audience and using stand mics as props. It’s an interesting approach (and it enables the use of a number such as “Hurricane”, about identified real-life figures in 1966 New Jersey, within a setting of 1934 Minnesota). But it adds to the distance; to revert to a screen analogy, it’s like a series of closing montages in HBO drama episodes, with wordless actions shown over a sourced musical number. The result is an intelligent, inventive production with no significant fault, but in the end no compelling connection either.

Written for the Financial Times.