I'm just back from the Old Vic.  An irregular venue for me, but also one where I have experienced the three best performances of my too-irregular theatrical-going life.  Nearly twenty years ago, Kevin Spacey enthralled in The Iceman Cometh and I am not sure anything else he did in his time as artistic Director at the theatre company was ever as good.  He was again superb in 2006 in A Moon for the Misbegotten, but no moment in that tale really compares with Spacey's first performance as Hickey, striding into a bar of apathetic drunken losers and somehow, fleetingly, giving them a sense of hope. [Ed, its always a shocker to now think back and know and have not known then, 14/11/17]

A decade later, I literally crumbled at the end of Groundhog Day, Tim Minchin’s re-imagining of the film originally starring Bill Murray. The show premiered for about six weeks at the Old Vic in 2016 and is now a massive hit on Broadway.  There was a nice moment on social media this week when Bill Murray went to see the new show, not once, but twice on successive nights.  He simply had to see it again.  I would love to do the same. 

Then this week, in a familiar seat, just behind an admired theatrical Lord of the realm, the open stage is slowly illuminated for a new show called The Girl from The North Country.   Written and directed by Conor McPherson, it looks and feels like the same territory as O’Neill’s The Ice Man Cometh.  An appropriate déjà vu moment then as the lost, the drunken, the delusional, the criminal and the unfortunate huddle together in a guest-house on the cliff-edge of Depression Era Minnesota.  The background is briefly narrated and closed by an elderly Doctor and the misfits struggle to find a way out of a spiral or debt, guilt, lies and deceit.  The moments of hope are all expressed in song, mining the vast Bob Dylan song-book, not to create some happy-clap-along Musical (the West End is already full of Kinks, Four Tops, Beatles and Jacko pastiche shows) but as moments of heart-felt expressions of hope, or anger, or even, love. 

The songs don’t mirror the narrative, nor drive it forward in anything other than an imperfect, strange, evocative way.  And Dylan's words are sung by all the cast.  By an escaped-convict pugilist, or a miserable lady in red while smashing her drum-kit, or, by Elizabeth [played by Shirley Henderson] an ethereal demented wife of the guest-house proprietor.  Twenty actors and musicians share the weight of the tale, but also grab the limelight for a fleeting moment, as they make you catch your breath at an arrangement of Like A Rolling Stone, Forever Young, Sweetheart Like You, or (I am convinced I heard a verse of) All Along The Watchtower.   A standing ovation followed and the press reviews have all been five star.  It's wonderful and raw and, like Once (reviewed on these pages before) it stays with you long afterwards.  

This week travelling South West to the Levellers' Beautiful Days festival, we took a diversion or two, looping off the A303, dodging Stonehenge via Salisbury and around the hills and dips across through Dorset and into Devon. Suitably, the car speakers thumped and hummed with the songs of XTC.  As we drove through green hills, another pastoral paradise was evoked by their Apple Venus and earlier albums; songs filled with misfit characters and criminals, the lost, the disillusioned, the unloved and the conscripted.  The journey and the time passed quickly in the company of the wit and artistry of Colin Moulding and Andy Partridge’s wonderful songwriting and the playing and arrangements of Dave Gregory, Terry Chambers and others.  Which got me thinking about a new possible writing project.  One not set in Minnesota, but maybe somewhere around Swindon, at the end of the last century, and it would end Stupidly Happily.      

You can get a glimpse here of The Girl from The North Country here.