It’s almost shocking to believe that beloved Australian actor Lisa McCune has never performed in Canberra throughout her illustrious 30-year career in the limelight.

With so many credits across musical theatre, television, and the silver screen, it’s never once brought her to the capital in a working capacity.

McCune will rectify that this week when she graces the Canberra Theatre stage as part of the ensemble cast of hit musical, Girl From The North Country.

“I can’t remember if my first job out of drama school ever came here,” she told Canberra Daily. “It will definitely be my first time at the Canberra Theatre.”

Written by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, Girl From The North Country features a selection of 20 Bob Dylan songs spanning his vast and varied discography, all selected by McPherson himself.

It began with Dylan expressing interest in a show being developed with his music. After receiving a host of expressions of interest, McPherson’s ultimately proved successful.

His process started by being sent everything Dylan has written, after which “he walked, and walked and walked and listened while he walked,” said McCune.

“There’s such a tightly woven concoction of stories and journeys in it that you have to wonder if he had a whiteboard to make it all come together, but it sort of does.

“There’s lots of loose ends, which I like; it wraps up at the end but you’re not sure what happens, it’s like splinters from an explosion, that’s what it feels like.”

Set in 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s hometown just several years before he was born – gripped by the Depression, Girl From The North Country sees a group of travellers converge on an unassuming guesthouse in the middle of winter.

McCune plays Elizabeth Lane, the owner of the guesthouse her family is losing because she has early onset dementia.

“I went ‘this character is really fascinating, she speaks the truth, she’s a disruptor’, you’re not quite sure if she’s there or not,” McCune said.

She describes the work as a “reimagined version” of Dylan’s songs as profoundly beautiful anthems of American life, a far cry from a typical “jukebox musical”.

“They don’t necessarily progress the story, they’re not necessarily like monologues; they’re kind of musical moments that thread through the show,” she said.

McCune was full of praise for the world McPherson has built around Dylan’s music – she regularly receives feedback from audience members who say the story stays with them long after the final curtain.

“He somehow manages to get inside you and get inside your head a little bit,” she said.

“There’s some beautiful dialogue in this show, there are some things people say that are just so poetic, a little bit like Dylan’s music, and you hear new things all the time.”

Featuring 19 actors and four musicians, it is an ensemble theatre piece in a true sense of the expression, something that was important for McCune emerging from the pandemic.

“I was in the middle of my sixth lockdown in Melbourne, it was winter, and it was really feeling a bit dire down there,” she said.

“I watched this piece that’s not uplifting from the beginning to the end, it has an honesty and a rawness about it, but yet, when it finished, I was just struck by this sense of hope it gave.”

McCune was also motivated by a drive to help bolster the live theatre industry after a devastating two years.

“I felt quite strongly that theatre was where we would need to do the most work, because you have audiences on the television platforms and we know people will tune in from home,” she said.

“But, to ever lose the opportunity and not have live theatre would just be, it’s been around for so long … I’d hate to see it disappear from our landscape or become culturally irrelevant; it would just be terrible.”

Girl From The North Country will be performed at the Canberra Theatre, 25 August to 3 September. Tickets: canberratheatrecentre.com.au

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