The songs of Bob Dylan as you have never heard them before - on the Chichester stage

Their story unfolds to music and lyrics by Bob Dylan – and it was Simon Hale’s job to reimagine Dylan’s music for the piece and its specific context. Written and directed by Conor McPherson and now on its first UK tour, the show plays Chichester Festival Theatre from January 24-28. “We have been out since the summer and the feedback has been really terrific,” Simon says. “The show itself has been around since 2017, originally at the Old Vic and then the Noël Coward and then we had a jaunt to New York and Broadway. It opened there on March 4 2020 and then closed very quickly after that. I got back March 11 around the time everyone was saying it was not recommended to go to the theatre (with the pandemic closing in).”

Simon is delighted the show is now able to hit the road in the UK: “I was originally asked to look at how we could use these songs within the play that Conor had written. He’d written these songs into the narrative as representative of feeling and not as you usually would in a musical where the music is maybe forwarding the plot. With this, it is more about mood and that's quite an unusual approach.” And the choice of songs continued into the creation of the show: “One day he might turn up with a song that was really quite obscure and I would have to be thinking how we could use that, to make it authentic, to make it part of it. We are talking about 1934 and Dylan wasn't born until 1941 and then it wasn't until the 60s when he started getting onto the stage and some of the songs were even more recent than that so I was having to reimagine them for quite some time before. I had to think about the harmonic structures and just really to think about the bare bones of the songs. It was nothing to do with Dylan’s performance or anybody else's performance of these songs. I was just thinking how the song could work in that context, tweaking harmonies, just making those sorts of changes. I think lyrically you can sense that they are all from the same person. There is such a sense of poetry to these songs and they're brilliant but the other thing is that you think that it sounds something really simple and you just think ‘Well, I could write something like that’ but when you break it down you realise just how skilful the songs are. And you realise just how robust they are. Conor said that they are built like a tank and he is right so I think you just have to, after the initial trepidation, just go with it and follow your instinct. A large part of it is about following your nose and then you realise that even Dylan has done lots of different versions of some of the songs. I don't think it really matters. You've just got to follow your instinct and make it authentic.”

The point is that you will be hearing the songs as you've never heard them before, and that was even the case for Dylan himself: “He came to see the show in New York in 2018 and there's one song in there that he really hadn't heard for quite a while. He must have written thousands of songs and he heard it and he just said ‘Yes, that's a great song.’ He was hearing it in a different context for the first time in a long time and he just said ‘Yeah that's good.’”