Blyth Festival at 50: The first artistic director, James Roy, reflects on the early years
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The first-ever artistic director of the Blyth Festival, James Roy, grew up on a farm in Huron County. His favourite childhood chore was cleaning the eggs produced by his family’s coterie of chickens. Once or twice a summer, the whole family would go swimming in Bayfield as a treat to beat the heat.
Roy was the Festival’s artistic director from 1975 to 1979. He may have consciously realized that he wanted to pursue theatre after seeing a production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie when he was in the ninth grade, but the seeds of Roy’s theatrical career were actually sown years earlier, on the family farm. “My mother used to write what she’d call ‘skits’ - little playlets. And there was a local group, left over from the war, that had a tiny little community hall just up the road, and they would get together for a little Christmas celebration, and she would write these little skits, and my brother and I would inevitably perform, and it was always great to get an audience to laugh. And she was very funny, so we’d get lots of laughs.”
“I saw the first [performance of The Farm Show] purely by chance. I’d been in Europe for a year, having taken a year off from university. When I got back, my brother and my best friend said, ‘hey, there’s these guys doing a show out at Ray Bird’s farm... we rode our bikes out - out of town, out towards Goderich, and then up on the Maitland Line. I’d heard of Theatre Passe Muraille, because it had been mentioned a few times when I was doing my second year at York University.”
Not knowing what to expect made seeing The Farm Show for the first time even more impactful for the young thespian. “I ended up in the barn watching the show - I’d never heard of Paul Thompson, I didn’t know any of the actors, and we were surrounded by an audience who had been invited, mostly people who were portrayed in the play... so all these people were at The Farm Show, watching themselves be done by actors. And it was great!” Roy proceeded to see The Farm Show several more times. “I saw it two, three, four, five times - in cattle auction barns. I saw it at the Clinton auction barn, I think I saw it at the Brussels auction barn, I saw it I don’t know where. I don’t think I ever saw it in Toronto.”
Roy was in the unusual position of being able to see the show as both a member of the local farming community and an urban theatre student. As a farm boy, the show’s truth resonated with him. “I remember Janet Amos doing a scene where she’s standing in the ringer washer, which was the same as what my mother had in those days, she didn’t like the modern washers, they didn’t get clothes as clean.” As a young man with a head full of the most modern theatrical theory, he was energized by The Farm Show’s bold originality. “There was a real energy to it, because it was the original actors. They had a personal connection to the material that any cast remounting a show just can’t have, particularly one where the original actors created it.”
Roy brought those two complementary personal perspectives together when he was tasked with planning the first year of programming for Blyth’s brand new theatre festival. He decided to take a big risk by producing a new play called Mostly in Clover, adapted from the writing of local author Harry J. Boyle. They also mounted a production of The Mousetrap - a popular Agatha Christie mystery.
After offering these two very different productions to the audience in Blyth, Roy observed that the crowds really responded to the locally-sourced material. “Mostly in Clover was a big hit, two years in a row…. One of the actors, Ron Barry, who was in the original company, was so funny in Mostly in Clover that literally, people were falling out of their seats. He’d get that kind of rolling laugh - it starts, it rolls, and then, no matter what you do, it just makes people laugh more. He had that ability to do just enough to keep it going.” That first show not only put the theatre on the map in terms of audience, it put the theatre on the map in terms of revenue.
Every artistic director of the Festival, past or present, will tell you that what has made the Blyth Festival so successful over the years is the deep connection between the local audience, the material presented on stage, and the theatre’s rural setting. And James Roy definitely believes in that concept, wholeheartedly. But Roy also believes that there’s a logistical factor contributing to the Festival’s longevity. “One of the advantages that Memorial Hall had, and still has, is the number of seats. You can make a decent return on a show when you have 400-plus seats. When you have 100 seats, or even 200 seats, it’s just not the same. Being able to fill the seats for the second half of the first run of Mostly in Clover was phenomenal.”
Of all the Blyth Festival plays Roy produced, one of his favourites is Patricia Mahoney’s This Foreign Land. “It was about the Dutch settlers that had come, and I remembered that, when I was growing up on a farm near Londesborough, we had young, Dutch hired men. That was typical - they would earn enough money to buy their own farm, and then they would bring over their families. And there are many, many successful farmers of Dutch origin in the area. What I really wanted to do at Blyth was sort of reflect all the aspects of the local culture, and when you sit down and think about it, there are more than you realize.”
This Foreign Land’s Blyth debut wasn’t just memorable because of its great script - it also featured future Stratford Festival star Seana McKenna. “Seana had just graduated from the National Theatre School... she had a choice to either be an intern at Stratford, or come to Blyth and become a company member.... It was the opening night of This Foreign Land, and we did not have previews in those days, so it was the first show with an audience. At intermission, in the black-out, she misjudged the glow tape of the proscenium arch, and she went downstage rather than upstage.”
All the way at the back of the theatre, Roy heard a thud in the dark. “It was the unmistakable sound of a body hitting something. Let me tell you, it is unmistakable. When the lights came up, she had crawled back onto the stage, and she was standing up, stuck on stage, with her back to the audience. Very smart - less noticeable. A lot of people got up and never knew. I rushed around backstage, and by the time I got around, she was coming down, with blood pouring down the back of her head. We took her to the hospital, she got some stitches - she didn’t have a concussion. Or at least she wasn’t diagnosed with one at that time. They’re better at diagnosing that now.”
The ever-professional McKenna shook it off and went back to work. “She was back on stage within a week. Well, we dropped two or three performances, and then we opened the next show of the season, and then we were back. So it was probably eight or nine days before she was back on stage. It was the beginning of the next week.”
Another highlight from his tenure as artistic director includes a musically-infused mounting of Lister Sinclair’s The Blood is Strong. “Scottish settlers - what’s better for Huron County? That one was done two years in a row - that one was very successful.” Roy also thoroughly enjoyed the hyper-local bent of The Blyth Memorial History Show, as well as Roulston’s first play - The Shortest Distance Between Two Points. “It was about local people fighting big government - a theme that, sadly, has not gone away.”
Then there was I’ll Be Back Before Midnight, by Peter Colley. “That’s a play that’s still being done,” Roy pointed out. Colley’s spooky comedy is one of the most successful plays in the Festival’s history. “There’s a company in Poland that does it every year - [Colley] actually got the idea from the place I was living in north of Blyth, in West Wawanosh. It suited me just fine, but he found it to be a little creepy.”
After their first season, Roy worked out a basic format for the Festival. “I developed the idea that we have four plays. I’d always make sure that there was something that should be an audience hit - like in my last year, it was I’ll Be Back Before Midnight. And that, of the four plays, we could, and we should, take a chance on at least one. I always programmed it last in the season, and it had the fewest performances. It was meant for all of us - the company and the audience. I’m not talking about heavy drama, I’m talking about a serious play, with a serious theme. These were for the people who were looking for a bit more to bite off. So that, to a certain extent, has continued, in terms of the Blyth programming.”
Also after that first season, Roy had fully articulated the original artistic policy of the Blyth Festival. “The plays are chosen to reflect the culture of the area. That’s Blyth, but it’s also Huron County, it’s also Western Ontario, and you can keep going up, but the most successful plays are the ones that are local. It’s that same old thing about how the most successful art is specific, not general. Nobody writes a universal play. You need to find the small ‘c’ culture in your community, and think ‘what would the people that are living in this way - what stories do you think they might want to see on stage?’... you know what, I know a couple of writers, I’ll bet I could find somebody who would be interested in writing a play about that. And that’s what Blyth has always done. It’s always commissioned more plays and put them on stage, probably, than any other theatre in Canada.”
Roy knew right away that the concept for the Blyth Festival was an innovative idea, but he soon realized that it’s also an ancient idea. “One of the reasons why I did Mostly in Clover was that I had learned, in my theatre history class, that all the great theatre movements were all really local. The Greeks were local - how big was Athens? The Medieval and Renaissance plays were all town plays, done by the Guilds and aimed at the local audience. Shakespeare - extremely local. Even though he sometimes set plays in Verona, or wherever, he was really writing about London, and he was writing about the monarchy. He was writing about the people that he knew. It was all extremely local, and somehow, we seem to forget that.”
Roy pointed to Blyth’s 2009 production of Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott as one of the many examples of how that first artistic policy has continued to guide the Festival forward. “The Steven Truscott trial is hyper-local. Bless Eric Coates for putting that on, and particularly Bev Cooper, for writing it... it took 40 or 50 years before you could do a play about it, but it was a really, really good piece. It laid out the story in a way that most people locally, including me, didn’t know. Because you only get a certain amount through local news. Well, now you get none. Almost none - except for The Blyth Citizen. I just had a conversation with Gil Garratt about the difficulty he has getting publicity anywhere else, in any paper, besides Blyth.”
Years of watching the people of Blyth watching plays in Blyth has helped Roy realize something - “They’re one of the country’s most sophisticated theatre audiences... they’ve seen four plays a year for 50 years. At least, lots of those people have. Or they’ve seen two or three a year. But it adds up. When you see a lot of plays, you develop very good judgment. You don’t necessarily know the jargon, but you have a very good idea of what you liked about a play and what you didn’t like about a play, and why. But also, you’re happy to come back again, even if you didn’t like it.”