The Rural Voice, 2002-08, Page 16Out of the barn at last
In 'Bamboozled', Ted Johns' character Aylmer Clark comes out
of the barn at last but he's still hilariously frustrated
with the modern world of farming.
Story by Keith Roulston
J1 Aylmer Clark is a typical farmer God help us all, and
yet like Charlie Farquharson, the equally untypical
Parry Sound farmer of Don Harron, Aylmer has become
become incredibly popular with farmers who don't mind
lau:,.ling at themselves.
So as soon as it was announced Ted Johns' Aylmer
would return to the Blyth Festival stage in Bamboozled:
He Won't Come in From the Barn, Part 11, the box office
phone started ringing. By mid-July many performances
were sold out.
The contrarian Aylmer, who retreated to his barn
because he was upset by the modern trends of farming he
saw around him, has filled more seats at Blyth Memorial
Hall in the Festival's history than any other show. Of
course the other occupants of the onstage "barn", various
cows, pigs and chickens, also helped to attract an audience.
He Won't Come in From the Barn was first performed
in the mid-1970s in the Toronto warehouse theatre
operated by Theatre Passe Muraille, headed by Listowel -
area native Paul Thompson. That show was a collective
creation of Thompson and the cast but the written record of
the script disappeared. When the opportunity came to
perform the show at the Festival at the end of the 1977
season, Johns closeted himself in the Commercial Hotel in
Seaforth and tried to piece together what he could
remember from the original show with new ideas he had
gleaned in more recent research.
It was the most controversial of the many productions of
the show that were to follow at the Festival. In those days
the only way to get the cows on stage was through the
stage door 20 feet in the air. The cattle were loaded into a
crate that was raised by forklift to stage level where the
cows could walk into their "barn".
It was the kind of operation that wasn't going to take
place for every performance, however, so the cows had to
stay in the theatre for the duration of the week-long run. A
special floor was constructed with a fibre -glass -lined gutter
to make sure the cattle wouldn't create damage, but the
idea of cows spending time on the stage of a hall dedicated
to the memory of fallen soldiers offended some people.
Still Aylmer and the cows were a hit and when Johns'
wife Janet Amos became artistic director of the Festival in
1980, she brought back He Won't Come In From the Barn
for the 1981 season, taking the role of Aylmer's wife Rose
for herself.
In the early 1990s Amos returned to the Festival when.it
found itself in financial trouble and Aylmer and the cows
helped put the theatre in the black again. Along the way
Aylmer also turned up as a guest in The School Show,
Johns' one-person show about the 1978 teachers' strike in
12 THE RURAL VOICE
- OM r NUM --
-- Mad
r
Ted Johns and
actress Caroline
Gillis meet their
Barnboozled co-
star, "The Golden
Calf" (top photo).
The first time
cows went on
stage (right) they
had to do in on a
fork lift. That's
Johns leading
them. Below,
cows are
introduced to their
stalls in an early -
1990s production
of He Won't
Come In from the
Barn.