First things first:
Girl From The North Country is not
a musical. It’s a play with songs. We expect the numbers in a musical
to be more or less integrated with the action; here, though, actors
move downstage behind old-fashioned stand microphones and deliver the
songs straight out to the audience, backed in unplugged style by piano,
guitar, stand-up bass, violin and anyone at hand to wield the
drum-brushes. The numbers themselves work as illustrations, commentary,
even as metaphor.
It’s all very understated. But that’s what you expect from Conor
McPherson, arguably Ireland’s finest living playwright. He’s never been
one for the grand gesture: he started out writing monologues and his
best-known play,
The Weir, is
basically just a handful of people sitting talking in a pub. This is
perhaps his most complex piece yet, with over a dozen characters in an
ensemble style, as well as those songs. Oh, did I not mention? The
songs are by a guy called Dylan, got a prize a while back from some
Scandies. McPherson has picked nearly 20 songs spanning almost 50 years
of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan’s career. In short, you don’t get to write
this stuff off as fluff or filler.
The story takes place in a down-at-heel rooming house in Duluth,
Minnesota in autumn 1934 (not quite seven years before Robert Allen
Zimmerman was born in the same city). Everyone – landlords, staff,
guests, even anyone who just drops in – is facing savage difficulties,
most of them to do with the economic hardships of the Great Depression,
some with plain old-fashioned racism. Few if any of their stories end
well.
And I’m sorry, but few if any go anywhere anyway. I’m a big fan of
understated writing, and therefore of McPherson, but here he’s got so
many people to be understated with that none of them ever get fleshed
out all that much. And when, like McPherson (who also directs), you
have a pool of acting talent to draw on that includes old associates
such as Ciarán Hinds, Jim Norton, Ron Cook, Bronagh Gallagher and
Stanley Townsend, that pretty much amounts to a waste.
The real sensation here is Shirley Henderson. Anyone who knows her only
as Moaning Myrtle in the
Harry Potter
films will be shocked by the bleak intensity of her performance as
Elizabeth, the landlord (Hinds)’s wife with early-onset dementia; even
those of us who know the breadth of her work were astounded by her
fierce rendition of “Like A Rolling Stone”. But overall, McPherson’s
resolve not to give in to the allure of the Dylan connection and the
siren call of sensation has resulted in an evening that, although
flawless, is... well, not sensational.
Written for The Lady.