Blyth Festival: Before the beginning - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

My two younger daughters and I will be attending the opening night of The Farm Show: Then and Now at the Blyth Festival’s Harvest Stage Friday night, giving my daughters a chance to see a show that was first produced before they were born.
I must admit to some degree of frustration when I saw the 50th season of the Festival would be celebrated by The Farm Show, which was created three years before the Festival was born in 1975 while ignoring the Festival’s founding production Mostly in Clover, adapted from the books of St. Augustine native and Order of Canada recipient Harry J. Boyle, but somehow Festival artistic directors have seldom been as enthusiastic about Clover as audiences were in the Festival’s founding year.

 

Nevertheless, The Farm Show was integral to the founding of the Festival. I had been in the audience for the first production in an old barn in Goderich Township in 1972. I’d been editor of The Clinton News-Record for two-and-a-half years before becoming publisher of The Blyth Standard and so I was watching the News-Record when my successor Jim Fitzgerald ran a story on a group of actors from Toronto who were researching a show west of town.

 

I was in Clinton one night to attend a meeting of the Huron County Federation of Agriculture and got there a little early because there was a street fair on main street. I happened to meet Fitzgerald and talked to him about the story. About the same time, Paul Thompson came along and Jim introduced me. Before we parted, I had wangled an invitation to the show, which was to be a presentation of material the actors had taken from their research in the community in Thompson’s style of having actors research and create the script.

 

When I took my family to the barn (we had but one daughter then), and watched from the hay mow as the actors tried out their materials, I was thrilled. Later, over refreshments, I (and many others) encouraged Thompson not to change the show when he took it to Toronto. He didn’t and a hit was created that took the show on tour back to the area where it all began, and later, to the eastern U.S states and to England.

 

It’s hard for people living in Canada today to understand the excitement surrounding Canadian theatre in 1972. Canada had celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1967 and a wave of pride swept the country. Theatre, in those days, was borrowed - from Broadway shows reproduced in Toronto to British classics at Stratford and the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Canadian stories, playwrights and directors suddenly were drawing interest, but, until The Farm Show, there was little recognition of rural Canada.

 

While talking to Thompson, I told him of plans to refurbish Blyth Memorial Hall, and the work headed up by Helen Gowing, chair of the Blyth Board of Trade, and we came up with the idea of Blyth as a summer base for Theatre Passe Muraille. But before that could happen, a fault was found in the roof structure of Memorial Hall. Engineers said the entire roof structure had to be replaced. The cost would be an astounding (then) $50,000. Village council had to ask questions of whether it was worth it.
Meanwhile, The Farm Show went on tour, with Ted Johns joining the cast, and played in the basement of Memorial Hall, as well as auction barns in Clinton and Listowel and the show hall of the Brussels Fall Fair.

 

By the fall of 1974, Blyth Village Council finally decided to go ahead with replacing Memorial Hall’s roof. Theatre Passe Muraille, tired of waiting, had picked Petrolia as its summer home. But over the winter, a young York University theatre grad working at Theatre Passe Muraille talked to Thompson about wanting to start a summer theatre. Thompson suggested getting in touch with me.

 

I would only learn years later that James Roy, a resident of Clinton, had also been in the barn for the testing of The Farm Show in 1972. In the coming years, with the success of the Festival thanks to Mostly in Clover, Roy often made use of people who began with The Farm Show.

 

Janet Amos began at Blyth as an actor and became a director and two-time artistic director. Anne Anglin, Thompson’s wife, was frequently on stage. Miles Potter as actor and director has often been part of the Festival, including this season as director of Mark Crawford’s, The Golden Anniversaries. David Fox, before his death from cancer, had starred in many Festival productions. Ted Johns, of course, became famous at Blyth as a playwright and actor and Paul Thompson was a frequent director. A second generation, Severn Thompson, is now working as associate artistic director and head of new play development at the Festival.
So the ties between Theatre Passe Muraille and the Blyth Festival go deep. Being at the opening of The Farm Show: Then and Now will be a special moment.