Images, big ideas and distorted facts. Had a hipster Julie Taymor directed a Garison Keillor monologue, it would end up something like this muddle of a show – a game, warm, entertaining misfire at trying to adapt the essence of a Dylan epic into a theatrical narrative, throwing music in whether the script can stand it or not. It’s sweet, it’s fun, and oh my does it have the best songs in London at the moment, but the thin script stretches itself even thinner to accommodate songs instead of story, and then struggles further under the weight of said songs. Beauty walks a razor’s edge – this has moments of beauty, and moments of, well...
In Girl from the North Country, Ron Cook turns out to be a dead, morphine addicted cowboy doctor. He narrates the story of Nick Laine, via the people closest to him: his ill-but-stylishly-ill wife; his writer/railroader/racist son; his peculiarly impregnated adopted daughter; and his under-moneyed widowed mistress. There are also his guests; the senior-citizen-suitor; the ‘doesn’t-know-his-own-strength’ Mice and Men cliché; his over-protective, under-characterised mother and his ‘bad investment’ father; the oily, blackmailing priest cliché; and Rubin Carter, apparently. They all do stuff. All have plots. Some have several. Sometimes they converge. Mostly they sing instead.
Can you tell what the problem is?
As jukebox musicals go – and this is indisputably a jukebox musical (an interesting, superior, and adventurous one, to say otherwise is simple snobbery) – what makes Girl from the North Country progressive and hypnotic is also what makes it dramatically inert and absolutely ridiculous. I think that, in his characters who are epithets first and characters after, in his stories which interweave, and in a setting which traps then overlaps these disparate lives, McPherson is writing a Bob Dylan song for actors. It’s a musical that wants to be one of its own songs – and takes (quite expertly, if quite technically) many elements of the music to make up itself (I wonder if, actually, Bat Out Of Hell kind of does the same, very differently?). Girl from the North Country wants to be “Gates of Eden”, or “Black Diamond Bay”, or, well, “Girl from the North Country”. And in its set-up – and in its mood – it doesn’t go as far as Dylan at his best, but it succeeds.
But mood doth not a play make. Once the elements are in place, songs can do thing with them theatre cannot. Characters come and go in a song, where they stick around on stage. In a song, Leo can appear on the Titanic for a line; a waitress can ask about hard boiled eggs for three verses; the Jack of Hearts is needed in every verse. On stage, to have them bumbling about in the back gets almost embarrassing. In a song, characters are given perfect context for perfect plots, be they Sweet Melinda the Goddess of Gloom, Napoleon in rags, or the One-Eyed Midget Shouting the Word Now. In a play, imagine those three line-dancing in the back while non-characters sang songs as they wait their turn to do some plotting again (actually, I’d pay to see that!).
Here, there’s no time to think. Girl from the North Country begins with exposition from a dead morphine-addicted cowboy doctor and only gets baggier from there. It’s a Dylanesque dramatis personae, but they don’t do enough. In McPherson’s play, Michael Shaeffer comes on in the perfect image of a priest. His mystery is revealed early on. He plays an old part, but he plays it well. He sings from the (underrated, then unforgivable, then epochal) gospel period. In a song, that would be one verse. But he’s got to hang around during the mistress and the marriage proposals and the dementia and the depression. He twiddles his thumbs for 45 minutes or so, until we’ve forgotten about him, he can come and blackmail the other lodger. This should be drama too – but the lodger and his family aren’t fleshed out yet, so it’s hard to feel much. Then they all twiddle their thumbs. Then there’s an actual murder. This should be the awful culmination of emotional highs – but we know nothing about these people, nothing but their bare basic bones, and rather than let the emotional moment matter, it turns into a karaoke barn dance. Other than that, the son’s plot strands include authorship ideals, losing his love, random racism, compromising his job, moving away, and looking after his ill mother – and he’s only the sixth most important protagonist! That’s to say nothing of Shirley Henderson sitting a lot, or Sheila Atim waiting a lot despite being absolutely wonderful. The action orbits around Nick Laine, but too much happens around him, very little to him, and nothing regarding him as a man in his own right – and he doesn’t even get a bloody song! Therefore, as our hero, he’s a wee bit dull. In songwriting, these elliptical scenes of epithets would be emotional. From the man whose The Weir perfectly calibrated the silences between stories, they feel undernourished.
Overburdened with plot, it’s not hard to follow, but it’s hard to care. Characterisation gives way to karaoke. Because there’s so little to the characters – and so much in the middle of their stories – all these people we used to know become illusions to us now. What we’re left with are under-fleshed-out characters setting up stories and failing to unite, failing to resolve. Scene after scene, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations – but no-one draws conclusions on the wall. We used to care, but things have changed.
Most of the time, McPherson’s clear-focused all around. The monologues – monologues. The Weir – five characters, five stories, stories alone. Had this had that focus, it would have worked – and indeed, at times, expertly did. Within Girl from the North Country, there is a brilliant play more in the McPherson mould, albeit mocking up the Minnesotan mindset too. The set-up – though Dylanesque in part – reminded me far less of an abstract Dylan epic, and more of an intimate Minnesotan monologue. Its folksy tangents on provincial lives in Northern America in their microcosms of meetings are the material of A Prairie Home Companion – and at its best, the thing this reminded me of most was Robert Altman’s sweet little final film in which Keillor’s monologues became manifest, and angels, cowboys and DJs can intermingle, indeed, people can sing off-topic songs into funky country radio mics, and strangest of all Lindsay Lohan can act. Less grotesque than many of Dylan’s cameo characters, the cliché of the wannabe writer, the preacher with no shame, the family regrets masked by hobbying and hardiness – these would be perfect material for Keillor’s distinctive drawl, and honestly, who wouldn’t want to see a Lake Wobegon-y world live on stage? When this focused on family, on friendship, on familiarity and on the four or five central familial figures, I felt McPherson was writing a play whose folksiness was familiar, focused, and fun – and that play I liked a lot. It’s the Minnesotan mood piece that works best here.
The characters who got McPherson’s focus, too, were exquisite – although that’s equally in part to some astonishingly good performances. Having a cast so strong, so game, somewhat wasted but committed to the script, elevates this production immensely. Ron Cook and Jim Norton, as ‘Occasional Ghost Narrator’ and ‘Punchline’, are underused as underwritten characters, and in a cast of twenty-odd they’re not alone. However, shining through, two performances beautifully characterise the joy and jumble of this unholy mess. Sheila Atim, with her eyes like smoke and her voice like chimes, gives a performance of glowing sincerity and gorgeous singing, her strident belief in her character grounding this clunky script in loneliness but hope. On the other hand, Shirley Henderson reveals a stunning singing voice – all the more surprising for her to be able to sing whilst simultaneously chewing all on the scenery she can. In a script like this, someone needs to take it ridiculously – and given permission to due to her character being one of two “disability makes me speak the truth” clichés here created, Henderson relishes the chance. It’s no coincidence that their big musical numbers are the ones which work the best – they imbue their (superiorly written) characters with the kind of emotions that need these songs to fill. Between Atim’s wide-eyed wonder and Henderson’s hilarity, the script is given a production far above what the knotty end result deserves.
They have the best tunes, too. When Sheila Atim’s loneliness is expressed like so, it’s eye-opening, or when Stanley Townsend and his wife sing about loneliness at their low ebbs, McPherson finally focuses on their feelings, and shows the show this could have been. “Forever Young” was sincere enough to wrap it up too – whilst I don’t think it felt wholly organic, it’s testament to Henderson’s strength at characterisation that it almost did. Mostly this doesn’t work, though, as a musical – and we can see that by seeing when it does work. Too many songs are given to otherwise non-speaking characters, and none given to at least three key characters – well, either this is a litmus test as to whether you go with the mood or not, or testament to inconsistent book writing. I’m afraid, given how well the mood works with the McPherson script alone and how well the songs work when McPherson bothers to incorporate, it feels far more the latter.
So there’s mood. And it’s a lovely mood. A melancholy mood. And largely this comes from McPherson’s Minnesotan mimicry. But there’s got to be more than that – which is what a Dylan song has, and what a great McPherson play has, and what this doesn’t have. The plots don’t work, the characters don’t get enough, there’s nothing to care for beyond songs I already care for. In plot trajectory, this ain’t going nowhere.
It’s worth saying that Dylan himself became unstuck in this very area. When living and breathing in front of us, this past-it singer was nothing as to this past-it singer, minstrels didn’t compare to minstrels, and an apocalyptic president was nothing as to a president of the United States who had to stand naked (quick straw poll – President Trump or President Mickey Rourke?). In cinema, the cameo nature is less egregious, but it’s still somewhat ridiculous. Girl from the North Country is far better than Masked and Anonymous, as the mood it evokes is far more moving, but it still struggling from an over-population of under-developed characters. As a mood piece, this is beautiful, if bafflingly imbalanced. As a character piece, I just think it fails as Dylan himself has failed before.
“I was thinking about a series of dreams, where nothing comes up to the top, everything stays down where it’s wounded, and comes to a permanent stop”. If you’re willing to let the series of dream-like vignettes wash over you, this has moments of profound, profound beauty – in character, in some emotions, in some of its oddities, in all of its songs. It could have been Steinbeck’s Prairie Home Companion via The Weir’s simple storytelling – and how wonderful that would be – and at its best, it was. But at other times, epithetical characters jostle for time and space, songs distract, too much happens and too little matters. It needs to be concise and too clear, instead it wiggle, wiggle, wiggles, like a bowl of soup. It goes toe-to-toe with The Weir and with “Black Diamond Bay”, and falls short, where both have mood AND character AND a purpose this lacks. Which is not to say I didn’t hugely enjoy some of its parts. There’s a lovely McPherson play where he expands on it. There are lovely Bob Dylan songs. The bits I loved I loved. The intermingling of these lovely individual pieces is ridiculous. The sum of these parts, alas, is too much of nothing.
I’d buy a soundtrack in a heartbeat, mind. All this churlishness – it’s 15 brilliantly sung Dylan songs! Admittedly, you get that on a Dylan album, but all in all I went with this. I just wish it wasn’t so meandering, so muddled, so meaningless, and it had more than that lovely mood. You could argue that whilst nothing really matters much, it’s mood alone that counts; I needed more. At the end, the mood had won me over, but the plot: why did any of it happen, and why should I care? It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why; it don’t matter anyhow.
P.S. Theatre trivia time!
1) During Dylan’s 80s wilderness, Dylan was co-star with perhaps the greatest living actor himself, Sir Mark Rylance! In Farts for Hire.
2) With the passing of the great Sam Shepard, we get the opportunity to relive the one good thing Dylan did in the 80s with Shepard's input – and what a great thing it is...
P.P.S. Whilst of course any fan of a jukebox musical’s artist will be miffed by certain omissions of superb, or relatively unknown, or leftfield, or underrated songs (although equally pleased by decent inclusions – THREE from Street-Legal!), it seems particularly odd to set this in Bob Dylan’s depression and not to use Bob Dylan’s late-period masterpiece on the depression, his superior-to-Steinbeck “Workingman’s Blues #2” ("The buying power of the proletariat's gone down, money's getting shallow and weak"). Everything that this is saying, that song says it just as good – I would hold that up as one of the finest works of his entire career, and as it details the pain of living through a depression but the joy of living anyway, it would work wonders in the main character’s mouth, were this to work as a musical, or as drama. Meanwhile, to set it in a Dylan-esque guesthouse means it really only could have ended one way...
