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24 March 2018

An inspired ode to Bob Dylan, Girl from the North Country turns pop into a work of art

Playwright and director Conor McPherson is always dancing with Dylan but never stepping on his toes.

By Ed Smith

On a gloomy Wednesday afternoon, I was part of a standing ovation for Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country, a play based around 20 Bob Dylan songs. Dylan fans can be a snobby bunch, and a part of me was secretly lining up a loftily superior reaction – a misreading here, a missed opportunity there, it isn’t this, it isn’t that.

All that melted away in the opening scene. Because whatever it isn’t, Girl from the North Country is pretty damned good. I left London’s Noël Coward Theatre feeling in equal measure entertained and exposed, while also wondering – not usually the case – why I don’t see plays more often.

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