The Rural Voice, 1995-09, Page 48Ted Johns (right) as Aylmer Clarke works with his son
Wayne (David Young) in the 1994 production of He Won't
Come In From The Barn, back for another season at Blyth.
He Won't Get Off The Stage
Even the fourth time around Ted Johns' He
Won't Come In From The Barn keeps selling
out at the Blyth Festival as rural audiences
flock to see their neighbours on stage
By Keith Roulston
The legend of Aylmer Clarke, his cows and pigs and
roosters, continues to grow.
Clarke is the character created by actor/playwright Ted
Johns for his play Ile Won't Come In From The Barn and
in the 18 years since his first appearance at the Blyth
Festival, he has packed the theatre time and again. When
the play opened in late August it marked the fourth season
the play had been presented at Blyth. The show was
brought back last year as part of the 20th season
anniversary celebrations at the Festival. It sold out before it
opened and an extra week of performances was added in
September. That sold out too and with so many people
being turned away, the show was brought back for a further
44 THE RURAL VOICE
two-week run at the end of this season. Three weeks before
the show was to open this year it was virtually sold out
again so yet another week of performances was added until
September 16.
The show has taken on a mystique all its own as people
tell stories about it to their neighbours and friends and even
more people want to see it. Part of the attraction is Johns'
co-stars: not the human actors on stage but the farm
animals. There at the back of the set, which looks like an
authentic reproduction of the stable of a traditional western
Ontario bank barn, are two cows. In one corner is a pen full
of weaner pigs. A rooster snoozes in the rafters. These
aren't authentic puppet props created by skilled theatre
technicians; they're the real thing.
Local farmers provide the animals. Each night, after the
performance, the cows are led down a ramp from the stage
and transported to a barn on the edge of the village where
they rest until their next performance. They don't have a
lot of lines to remember but they seem to get some of the
best laughs when, somewhere during each performance,
they do the kind of things cows do — especially if they've
been munching hay all day.
People are also attracted to the play by Johns'
outrageous sense of humour and his creation of a character
that doesn't quite fit in in modern society. In He Won't
Come In From The Barn, Aylmer Clarke just decides that
his barn is where he feels more comfortable than anywhere
else, so he moves in. His son, who had hoped to modernize
the place, gives up on him. His wife shrugs and goes off to
visit relatives in Ireland. His neighbour, caught up in the rat
race of running a good modem farm, both envies Aylmer
and despairs of him. A government vet is incredulous to
see that he still has pigs and milking cows in the same barn
and tries to close him down. A real estate agent wants him
to sell. In fact it seems to become an issue of great national
importance to get him out of the barn. For some, he is an
embarrassment. A farm organizer points out that 20 per
cent of the farmers produce 80 per cent of the food while
80 per cent produce 20. Aylmer, he says, is in the bottom
two per cent of the 80 per cent. For others, he becomes a
symbol of defiance, "a spoke stuck in the wheel of the most
voracious money machine the world has ever seen" as
Johns describes it.
Johns first created Aylmer, based on his uncle (a
Clinton -area farmer), for a production of the play at
Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille in the 1970s. The charm
of the play was lost on one legendary Toronto critic who
hated the show so much that when she retired eight years
later, she listed it among the worst pieces of theatre she'd
ever seen.
By then the play had taken on a new life far beyond the
ability of the critic to influence the audience. The show
was mounted at the Blyth Festival in 1977, a co -production
of Theatre Passe Muraille and the Festival. At that time the
only way the cows could be brought into the Blyth
Memorial Hall was through a stage door 15 feet in the air,
using a crate on a fork lift. Once in, the cattle had to stay in
a specially constructed stable that included water proof
gutters. Still there were horrified complaints from some in
the community who felt the soldiers memorialized in the
Hall were being dishonoured.
For rural audiences, however, the show was a huge hit,