Girl From The North Country (Old Vic Theatre, London)

Verdict: Knocking on Heaven’s Door

Rating:

Conor McPherson’s play, set during the 1930s Depression era in America, boasts a triple blessing: McPherson’s exceptional talent as both writer and director in creating an atmospheric mood; an extraordinary ensemble of actor-singers-dancers portraying the downtrodden, the outcasts, and the troubled individuals in his story; and a soundtrack featuring 23 Bob Dylan songs. McPherson is the only playwright to whom Dylan has extended such a rare opportunity.

Skillfully woven and reimagined through Simon Hale’s enchanting arrangements, the music gives voice to the almost inexpressible feelings of these lost souls drifting in the wind.

Having returned to the Old Vic, where it premiered in 2017, the play is even more powerful this time. Initially, there was uncertainty about its success, but now its brilliance is undeniable.

Last refuge of lost souls: Nick (Colin Connor) and his wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben, in their run-down boarding house in Minnesota, peopled by failures and fugitives 

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.

Girl from the North Country: Pregnant Marianne (Justina Kehinde) and her father (Colin Connor) battle over his efforts to try to marry her off to a 70-year-old widower

Everybody dance now: The cast of Girl From The North Country forget their troubles and lose themselves in one of the 23 Dylan songs featured in the show at the Old Vic

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, London)

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.

Political foes: Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan (Michael Sheen, right) managed to annoy Winston Churchill (Tony Jayawardena) and also Neville Chamberlain

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.

PATRICK MARMION