WHEN Elijah Williams was offered the featured role of Joe Scott in the Bob Dylan musical “Girl from the North Country” he wasn’t a Bob Dylan fan at all, but he is now.

Williams, who stepped into the role at the end of the Sydney season, coming straight from a Sydney Theatre Company production, tells me: “I was aware of Dylan, but had no understanding of his music… once I immersed myself in the score, it opened my eyes to the lyricism and the poetry. I fell in love with the nuance of his writing.” 

Joe, he explains, is the catalyst of the things that happen in the play, which is set in a boarding house in Depression-era Duluth, Minnesota, the city of Dylan’s birth. 

“It’s like an Irish play with American songs,” another cast member says of the text by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, who also directed the show. 

It’s not like a conventional musical at all, but is rather a series of encounters and internal reflections, backlit with atmospheric stage pictures, “creating the feeling of an on-going epic saga, rather than a musical”, “CityNews” reviewer Bill Stephens has written.

“Girl from the North Country” was written after McPherson was approached by Dylan’s record company to create a play around his songs and Andrew Ross’ small, live band uses simple acoustic instruments of the era to play no fewer than 22 Dylan songs in the show.

Apart from Williams’ showstopper, “Hurricane”, there’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, “All Along the Watchtower”, “There’s A Slow Train Coming”, “Forever Young” and the 2012 Dylan number “Duquesne Whistle”.

The action is set up by Terence Crawford as Dr Walker, who introduces characters, narrates the show and explains what eventually happened to various characters.

The focus is on the boarding house individuals but, as with the famous Dylan number, “Hurricane” (which details the wrongful conviction of former middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter), the songs reflect the characters in the moment. 

Williams’ character, Joe, loosely based on Carter, is an ex-con, a runaway wrongly accused of a crime and defacto, the pivotal role in the show.

“Joe is the reason for what’s happening in the house and it’s his relationship with Marianne that is the central point as the characters try to look at life for what it is, so fickle and turbulent,” he says.

As well, between Marianne and Joe there’s what he calls “a little bit of Romeo and Juliet dream world” as they talk of marrying – “the play has its dark moments but that’s the romantic aspect to it”.

NIDA-trained Chemon Theys, who has transferred from the ensemble to play Marianne, was not a Dylan fan either, but now she loves performing the tight harmonies in the show and told us earlier in the year: “I love the fact that this is a play with music, you don’t need all the glitz… it’s like a straight play, it’s so beautiful… I guess the show brought out my appreciation”.

Unlike Theys, Williams is self-trained, so the role represents a big opportunity for him.

He migrated to Australia as a refugee from Sierra Leone aged four and was later schooled at the elite Saint Ignatius’ College, Riverview, in Sydney, where both music and drama are strong.

Williams got a solid classical music grounding at school, but was already “doing drama, jumping into characters, developing a taste for it – I wasn’t trained, but I figured out all you had to do was be truthful to the writing.”

Success followed school and now he’s hot theatrical property in Sydney. 

“I just got jobs. I was fortunate to be surrounded at an early stage of my career by well-trained actors who pulled me aside and gave me advice,” he says. “I also spent a lot of my time watching people like director Mitchell Butel, and that’s how I developed my career.”

Of his big break in “Girl from the North Country” Williams says: “It’s certainly an actor’s dream to play a character that has so much depth and cultural nuance.” 

In the show, he believes, the wrongly convicted Joe stands for a lot of African-Americans who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and asked to take the rap. Dylan’s “Hurricane” argues that we should right the wrongs.

“Girl from the North Country”, Canberra Theatre, August 25-September 3.