Although the 50th season of the Blyth Festival was celebrated last summer, we’re coming up to a historic date this month, when I received a letter from young James Roy to see if I’d be interested in meeting with him to talk about starting a theatre in Blyth.
    I was thrilled at the possibility. I’d been trying since The Farm Show was first performed in a barn near Clinton in the summer of 1972, to host Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille in Blyth Memorial Hall but getting the building up to safety standards kept that vision from happening in both 1973 and 1974, so eventually Thompson accepted the invitation to make Petrolia his summer headquarters.
    James Roy, unknown to me then, was also in the barn in 1972 for the first performance of The Farm Show. At the time, he was living in Clinton, a student of the York University theatre program. After graduating, he was working for Thompson in the winter of 1974-75 when he mentioned he wanted to start a theatre. Thompson suggested he should contact me.
    I have a photograph of James sitting in the front row of the theatre when he came to Blyth in the spring of 1974. James had actually been brought up on a farm a few miles south of Blyth before his father gave up farming and moved to the Sarnia area. He had been in the basement of Memorial Hall to receive a vaccination but had never seen the theatre, which had since become available for use after the entire roof had been replaced. 
    We decided to start a theatre and James declared it would begin that summer (we were both young and impatient).
    Going home, James wondered what to program that summer. He wanted to do something Canadian but there were few Canadian plays back then. He remembered reading a book by Harry J. Boyle, about life in West Wawanosh Township and pulled Mostly in Clover off his mother’s book-shelf; he decided he could make a play from it and other, similar Boyle books. Because he was uncertain of an audience for a local story, he booked Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap as the second show.
    To make a long story shorter, Mostly in Clover was a huge hit and The Mousetrap would become the only non-Canadian play the Festival ever produced. 
    The thing that makes this story suitable for a farm magazine now, is that there was so much about early farm life in Mostly in Clover. I remember the theatre rocking with laughter for “the stove-moving scene”, recalling that annual struggle to take the wood stove out of the front room for the summer. There were stories of the mother’s efforts in cooking and tasks in the barn. There was a hilarious scene about driving the teacher to school and getting involved in a buggy-race.
    Since then there have been many plays about farming. In 1984 Anne Chislett and I co-wrote Another Season’s Promise about the effect of high interest rates for farmers. It was such a hit that the next season it was taken on a national tour.
    We would turn to the next generation of the same family in 2006 for Another Season’s Harvest, when panic shut down export of cattle, crashing prices and leaving beef producers teetering on the edge.
    There have been more than 150 world premieres at the Blyth Festival over 50 years. This summer there will be two more premieres, one Radio Town a tribute to the legendary “Doc” Cruickshank, founder of CKNX radio. As well, both Anne Chislett and I will have popular plays restaged: Anne’s Quiet in the Land about the pacifist Mennonite community in the First World War and my play from 20 years ago, Powers and Gloria. 
    So much has changed in 50 years but the Blyth Festival is one of the startling improvements.◊