Review: Girl From The North Country offers an odd, haunting and rather special evening in Chichester

Very little happens in Girl From The North Country. It’s in no hurry to go anywhere in particular. And yet it is absolutely irresistible. Rather like Bob Dylan, whose songs are woven throughout it, it’s the strangest beast – but a beguiling one.

Written and directed by Conor McPherson, the piece is set in a down-at-heel guest house in Depression era America in 1934. Here a bunch of disparate characters, some of them family, others pretty random, collide in all sorts of different and variously intriguing ways as they try to work out their futures – from the convict on the run to the dodgy businessman, from the wayward son to the daughter with hopes, from the dad struggling to hold it altogether to the mother who seems to have lost the plot and yet flashes moments of insight.

It's their intersection that’s captured – and it’s oddly compelling. Completing the piece, of course, are the songs of Bob Dylan which fuse it all together perfectly. There’s nothing much about Dylan that suggests this particular circumstance; after all he was born a decade later and came to prominence three decades later. Yet the songs find their echoes in the perfect piece for the Dylan sceptics amongst us, those of us who know that the songs are great and yet just can’t quite get past the Dylan voice. This is the best possible way in: the songs, sometimes in snatches, are performed inventively, imaginatively and beautifully here. Is Your Love in Vain? and Forever Young are hugely poignant, but the greatest moment, inevitably, is the sublime Like A Rolling Stone – the finest song the Stones ever covered and a song in fact so brilliant that it would sit very comfortably amongst their very own very finest. And yet Dylan’s own various versions just aren’t in the same league. Here it is given full value – a key part of an odd, haunting and rather special evening.