Blyth Festival 2024: Pat Flood builds on her over-40-year relationship with the Festival
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The Blyth Festival has told a lot of different stories over the past 50 years, each one of which has existed on the stage at Memorial Hall as its own little, self-contained universe. The world of each play is born as an idea, conceptualized, constructed and, for the show’s short run, populated with inhabitants that are observed by the audience. When the show comes to the end of its run and the audience is gone, that world is taken apart and put away to make room for the next set of shows, with their own new worlds, inhabitants and audiences. As a set designer who’s been involved with the Festival for over 40 years, Pat Flood has created quite a few of those temporary, self-contained worlds, though none of them have been quite so literally “self-contained” as the set she’ll be designing for this year’s Resort to Murder - a modern murder mystery set in an escape room.
Flood was happy to spend a few minutes away from planning the perfect murder set to have a chat with The Citizen about how she translates words on a page onto the stage, the particular challenges of this year’s show, and what’s been bringing her back to Blyth for all these years.
Like many other theatre professionals arriving to work in Blyth for the first time, Flood wasn’t sure what to expect from this little town, but it didn’t take long before she began to see the appeal. “The first time I came to Blyth was in the 70s, when I was working at Stratford. Stratford was a great place to work and learn my craft, but there was just a connectedness in Blyth.”
That feeling of connectedness stuck with Flood, and she found herself coming back, summer after summer, to contribute her unique stagecraft to the still-young festival, and her enthusiasm for what Blyth has to offer has never waned. “It’s just a great place to work! We’ve had our days. We’ve had good seasons and bad seasons. I could tell you stories about our bad seasons! But I just love this place - it kind of stole my heart in the 70s.”
Flood has, on many occasions, felt the impact that the Festival has had on the rural community of Blyth and the surrounding area. When watching a production of Anne Chislett’s The Tomorrow Box, she saw the audience stand up and cheer, mid-scene, upon the entrance of a character. “It was because they knew this guy,” she explained. Seeing one of their own on such a professional stage was thrilling. Even now, so many years later, it’s still exciting to see talented local people treading the boards alongside seasoned professionals.
Flood also remembers how people reacted to the first production of Ted Johns’ The School Show, in 1978. The play told the story of the real-life teachers’ strike that had stirred up a tremendous amount of controversy just a few months earlier. “Here I was in this little town of 900 people, and then I saw this line of, like, 200 people waiting to get tickets to the show. And they were so engaged - people were shouting things during the show. There’s a connectedness there that’s just vital. Sometimes the homegrown voice, the rural voice, gets overlooked.”
Having been here for so many seasons, Flood has seen the Festival go through many changes over the years, and she sometimes catches herself seeing double when she looks around - the Festival spaces as they are now, and as they once were. “I have to stop myself from saying ‘I remember when…’” she explained. The Blyth Festival has grown a lot since Flood’s first season - it’s expanded to include a rehearsal space, an art gallery and, most recently, an outdoor performance space - the Harvest Stage. As for the town itself? “Blyth really hasn’t changed. The town’s the same, the people are the same - the food’s better. We used to drive all the way to London just to get pizza!”
Flood recalls how difficult it was in the 70s and 80s to find a place to tell Canadian stories, and what a welcome relief it was to find the Festival and its mandate for producing new, local works. “Blyth is a really important, significant place. It’s an interesting crossroads. It’s fostered so many Canadian plays, and is constantly supporting writers and playwrights.” Flood has found that the combination of the Festival’s small-town connectivity and steady influx of new plays by new writers has often allowed her access to the thought processes behind the scripts, which gives her a lot more material with which to work. “For me, as a designer, there’s nothing nicer than to work on a play and actually know the playwright. You can ask them all kinds of questions. I can’t ask Chekov, but I can ask Birgette Solem.”
Solem, as the author of Resort to Murder, has crafted a thoroughly modern murder mystery set in an escape room, for the Festival’s 50th season. It’s Flood’s job to create a realistic sense of the inescapable on the stage at Memorial Hall, which means she’s going to be taking a bit of a different approach to this set. “Since it’s an escape room, I have to do something very traditional, which to me is very much like film design. I’m putting on my film designer hat for this show, because it’s very realistic. What I love about set design is just the opposite - the poetry and the abstraction. Just a few things can suggest so much. I love the poetry of theatre design. To do things that stimulate the audience’s imagination.”
Once her part is done and her set is constructed by the Festival’s skilled crew, it’s up to the director and cast to bring it to life, and Flood is keen to see the results. “I’m really excited to see how Resort to Murder comes to fruition. I love the script, I love the cast, and [Director] Randy Hughson is just wonderful.” And, at the end of the show’s run, Flood’s well-thought-out world will be dismantled and put away. But that is of little concern to her - she’ll have already moved on to another story awaiting a world. “I love making the words visual. Reading the play and imagining it as a three-dimensional space. That’s the best part.”