Our beloved rural future is at stake - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Well, the Blyth Festival has finished its 50th anniversary season, the streets of Blyth are not crowded with hundreds of people trying to find a place to park and the merchants are missing the extra customers coming in.

 

As someone who was there in the beginning, it’s hard to imagine what the Festival has become all these years later after a young James Roy and Anne Chislett came to town in the summer of 1975, dreaming of starting a summer theatre. It was a time so different than today. Eight years after Canada had celebrated its centennial, Canadians first felt subservient to Britain, and then to the United States, but soon became more confident about their own country. 

 

Before then, theatre in Canada had mostly been about British or American stories, as at the Stratford Shakespearian Festival or the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. Suddenly, Canadian theatres like Tarragon in Toronto became popular. There was a real breakthrough when Paul Thompson brought a bunch of young actors to a farm near Clinton and talked to farm neighbours and collectively created The Farm Show, which became a hit when it went back to Toronto in the fall of 1972.

 

I was in the audience for The Farm Show in a barn near Clinton on a Sunday afternoon when the company performed, for a mostly local audience, the stories they had worked up after researching the show. Also there, unknown to me, was a young York University student from Clinton:  James Roy. 

 

Having discovered the Memorial Hall theatre after Jill and I bought The Blyth Standard in 1971, I began working on Thompson with the idea of making Blyth a summer base for his Theatre Passe Muraille, but Memorial Hall required a new roof and, while the huge project dragged on and on, Thompson decided instead to go to the Petrolia Opera House, which also wanted a summer theatre.

 

But after graduating, James Roy worked at Passe Muraille in the fall and winter of 1974/1975 and told Thompson about wanting to start a new summer theatre. Thompson knew that the new roof design had finally been completed and suggested Roy contact me. He did in March of 1975 and, young and ambitious as he was, decided he’d start a summer theatre that year. He chose to create a play collectively from a Huron County writer Harry J. Boyle. Mostly in Clover was a smash hit. Roy decided from that moment that the Blyth Festival would be dedicated to plays of local interest and, over the next 50 seasons, that’s what it has done, with more than 100 premiere performances.

 

The Citizen’s special issue celebrating those 50 seasons was a tremendous effort by the newspaper’s staff, the kind of thing that only the local, community-owned newspaper could pull off. Small though the paper’s staff is, it’s still the largest in Huron County. Shawn Loughlin and Scott Stephenson managed to track down all eight previous Artistic Directors and learn from them their stories and their most memorable plays.

 

Also in that issue were clippings from the old Blyth Standard about the beginning of the Festival. Though I was intimately involved and wrote many of those stories, I can’t take credit for their still being available. I was so busy concentrating on the next paper that I didn’t take the time to preserve the paper we had just published. It was A. Y. McLean, to whom we sold The Standard after I became infatuated with theatre, who dug out copies of each paper and maintained Blyth’s history, as well as that of the Festival. 

 

Though I knew how important local newspapers were in recording local history, it became most evident to me recently at meetings of community members planning a history of Blyth’s last 50 years, as teams over and over mentioned reading old files of The Standard and The Citizen to get details.

 

The Citizen is still serving the community today, much better than other community newspapers in Huron County. Finding tickets for all the newspapers - weeklies and dailies -  that wanted to send reviewers to the Festival used to be a challenge. There are few reviewers these days. In fact, it’s hard to see how Artistic Director Gil Garratt manages to attract sold-out audiences when there is so little media coverage.

 

One wonders if the next 50 years will be as successful as the last. Will young theatregoers replace the older patrons as they age? So many of the summer theatres that were born after Blyth’s success, like the theatres in Meaford and Kincardine, have also died.

 

So many businesses in Blyth have been attracted because of the success of the Festival,  where once people shopped in Blyth weekly for necessities.

 

The future of our communities, and its theatres, is at stake. People of all ages must be engaged or there may be no 100th anniversary for the Blyth Festival.