The Rural Voice, 1999-06, Page 20Amr
TELLING For 25 years the Blyth
RURAL
TALES
Festival has been letting
farm and rural people
see their stories
onstage, and letting
urbanites learn
more about
the country
too.
He Won't Come in from the Barn (top) which turned the Festival's
stage into the inside of a barn, complete with cows and pigs, proved
so popular it was brought back four different times. Another
Season's Promise (centre) told the heart -wrenching story of one
family's experience in the farm debt crisis of the mid-1980s. The
Tomorrow Box (bottom) had fun with the changing nature of a farm
family in such a way that even Japanese audiences understood. A
Japanese language version played to more than 100,000.
16 THE RURAL VOICE
Even before the completion of
the first, four-week season in
1975, the light bulb went on
for the Blyth Festival's original
Artistic Director, James Roy. What
the customers wanted was their own
stories, not the pap of summer
schlock.
This preference had been made
clear by the fact that Roy's hurried,
collective adaptation of Harry
Boyle's Mostly in Clover, outdrew,
by two to one, the much better-
known Agatha Christie mystery hit,
The Mousetrap.
Roy, who directed the theatre for
its initial five seasons and who is now
a CBC Radio producer and current
member of the Festival's board of
directors, admits that his decision to
take on Clover was not something he
had thought out. He was mainly
interested, as he says, "in making a
play out of nothing," based on his
experiences at the then, Paul
Thompson -directed, Theatre Passe
Muraille in Toronto.
Yet there was one guiding
principle in the choice. "I wanted to
do something that came out of their
culture" he says. Boyle's book does
just that through a series of anecdotal
reminiscences about growing up in
Huron County during the Depression.
Yet, one money -making season
does not a successful festival make.
Were there enough stories from this
basically rural community to allow
the Festival to continue to make a
connection and could the theatre
continue to tell them in such a way as
to attract audience members from that
community?
Twenty-five years later, as the
theatre celebrates its silver
anniversary, and one asks, "How're
we doin'?" in regards to those
questions, the•answer, from writers,
directors, actors and, most
importantly, the rural community,
would seem to be, "Pretty darn good!
With one or two shortcomings and
one major lapse."
The major reason for the largely
positive response lies with what
could be termed "the identification
factor". .
Dave Linton, a cash -crop and pig
farmer from the Brussels area, who
has been going to plays at the
Festival for over 15 years, feels
strongly that the plays have presented