Blyth Festival at 50: Co-founder Anne Chislett returns to Festival to bring it into the 2000s
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The first founder of the Blyth Festival, Keith Roulston had both the dream and the drive to make it happen. The second founder, James Roy, supplied a vision for the future and enough verve to fuel those first few years which meant that the only thing left for the third founder, Anne Chislett, to add was a little bit of experience and an astonishing amount of artistic talent. She wrote and directed numerous hit plays during her time in Blyth, and was the festival’s artistic director from 1998 to 2002.
Chislett was born in Newfoundland, and first became interested in theatre when it came to her in the form of a British theatre company that arrived on the east coast when she was a child, set up shop, and started putting on live shows. “Somehow, they made a go of it,” she recalled. “Now, looking back, I can’t imagine what the economics of that situation were. All of us kids had subscriptions to the Saturday matinees - must have been quite inexpensive.” The London Theatre Company came to St. John’s from Liverpool in the fall of 1951 and formed the first weekly, professional, repertory theatre company in Canada. They performed 26 plays every season. “I’d always been a little bit interested in theatre,” Chislett admitted. “I’d seen amateur shows, but it was the regular dose of Saturday matinees that got me absolutely hooked on it.”
Chislett is the only one of the three festival founders who didn’t see the first run of Theatre Passe Muraille’s The Farm Show. “It was the second manifestation of The Farm Show that I saw. I’d just finished teaching in Clinton, and I’d moved away, but I heard about it, so I came back to see it, and it was quite magical.” She recalls less about the seminal show itself than she does the overall experience. “I remember meeting the people that it was about. It was quite interesting! At that time, there was just beginning to be a bit of Canadian theatre - but this was theatre that came right out of the community. It was unique in that way, and it was a new experience, and it was very exciting to watch.”
Those who grew up with institutions like the Blyth Festival may take the steady stream of new, Canadian plays for granted, but Chislett recalls what things were really like back in the day. “When I studied theatre at UBC, there was never a Canadian play. There was never much attention paid to an audience. It was all very intellectual, German, abstract stuff. So, what theatre became in Blyth - the emotional connection, the shared experience, the feeling of community - it’s what it must have been in ancient Greece, at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.”
Chislett was Roy’s assistant artistic director that first season. She recalls the same oft-told story of the original Blyth Festival throwdown in which locally-produced underdog Mostly in Clover defeated Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, but she recalls it a bit differently. “The legend has it that nobody saw the Christie, and everybody saw Mostly in Clover - that wasn’t entirely true, they both did very well. But at that point, there was no air-conditioning in the theatre, and it was weather like this - so hot. The varnish on the chairs melted, so when everybody leaned forward to laugh or clap, you would hear ‘RRRRIIIIIPPPP!’”
Beyond the satisfying ripping of sticky skin peeling off of wooden chairs, there’s another sound that Chislett recalls from that night. “I still remember vividly that first laugh in Clover - waiting for it, and suddenly hearing the audience erupt in laughter - you knew you had a hit. It was lovely.” After Mostly in Clover succeeded in really connecting to the crowd, Chislett developed a real taste for audience response. “There’s a moment, if something’s really, really, working, between the final black-out and when the applause starts. I live for that moment.”
After that first season, they put out an open call for new plays to stage. “We got two responses - one from Jim Nichol, and one from Peter Colley.” The play from Colley, I’ll Be Back Before Midnight, went on to become an international sensation. “It was a big mega-hit,” she laughed, “which is still providing the author with a luxurious lifestyle in California. It traveled the world and is still, in fact, being produced. So that’s quite amazing.”
Since not many scripts were coming in, the Festival decided to start commissioning the kind of work its founders wanted to see. “We commissioned an enormous amount of our plays. There were relatively few that came in and landed on the desk, and just had to be done. But occasionally there was. Thirteen Hands was one that I really wanted to do that already existed that had been done elsewhere. But for the most part we commissioned, because the plays weren’t there in the beginning.” Once they finally had the plays coming in, Chislett found it could be difficult to select among them. “Inevitably, choosing the first three are easy - for the last one or two - it’s impossible.”
One important part of the existing local culture that wound up really bolstering the Festival in the early days was the food. Specifically, the traditional country supper. “When we started attracting an audience, there were no restaurants. There was nowhere for them to eat. Someone was running the hotel, but it was more of a bar then... The Blue Blyth Inn. But there was the head of the Women’s Institute - Evalena Webster. She took over the hospitality element, and produced these country suppers. It made going to Blyth a real experience for people. It was a huge selling point.”
While she loved working with talented artists like Janet Amos, Shawn Kerwin, Ted Johns and Eric Coates, there’s one person who always comes to mind when she thinks of her time with the Festival - her frequent collaborator, Keith Roulston. “He is always my sort of go-to. Keith is always ‘Mr. Blyth’ to me. We both worked together, and he’s also the person who really got it going, and he remains a good friend.”
One of her favourite examples of a locally-oriented success was a play she wrote with Roulston. “Another Season’s Promise evoked quite a response from the audience, and has since traveled a bit in the farming community and was recognised by farmers. And that means a great deal to me. Other times, it’s just a lighter approach to being in Huron County, and being in rural Canada.”
She also had some pretty dynamic accomplishments during her time in Blyth, like Paul Thompson’s The Outdoor Donnelleys, a sprawling piece of theatrical art that took place in a variety of different locations. “It wasn’t just all over town - it was all over the county! It had some great moments, and I loved the experience of seeing bits of it every night,” she recalled. “When [Thompson] came with the idea, I had to get a grant for it - it was kind of expensive. I remember his face when I said ‘we’ve got the grant!’ and he realized he had to actually do it.”
Fifty years ago, Anne Chislett first set out to found a rural theatre festival with Keith Roulston and James Roy, and it’s still going strong. “It’s a bit of a miracle, isn’t it? One thing we always did, right from the beginning, with James, and with Janet, we always had the continuity in mind, so we’re always bringing somebody else along who would take over - it was never thrown out to the winds. Gil was the director of the Young Company when I was there, somewhere around 2000. So he’s been associated with it now for something like 20 years, and I’m sure he’s bringing up people that will succeed him.”
Chislett feels that the artistic director’s job is a balancing act. “You have to have a vision of what kind of theatre you want to present to your audience, and what audience you want to bring into the theatre. I don’t think it’s just enough to go up and throw on stage what you want to do, with stuff that you like. I mean, it’s necessary to do things you like - there’s no point in doing work that you don’t like. But I think, beyond that, there must be some overall vision of what you’re communicating. I gather the audience has changed quite a bit, but in the olden days, we were doing plays that had a direct emotional key-in to the audience. It wasn’t like we were importing culture and showing it to them. It was involved.”
During her many years of active involvement with the Blyth Festival, Anne Chislett has certainly learned a thing or two, but there’s one thing that still stands out to her. “I learned that the point of theatre is connection to the audience. Theatre is communication - a collective experience, rather than the imposition of culture... and the thing I failed to learn was patience.”