The Rural Voice, 1999-09, Page 22Atwood native Paul Thompson, now an internationally famous theatre
director, creates a play on the last days of threshing bees — a time
When farming changed ed forever
By Keith Roulston
ou might say that Paul
Thompson has moved
upstairs in the barn. The man
who originally created the theatre
phenomenon He Won't Come in
Froin rhe Barn has moved onto the
threshing floor with Death of rhe
Hired Man.
In He Won't Come in From the
Barn, Thompson turned the theatre
stage into the stabl4 of old fashioned
farmer Aylmer Clark, complete with
live cows, chickens and pigs. For
Death of the Hired Man Thompson
and his designer, Glenn Davidson,
are turning the theatre into the inside
of a typical bank barn at threshing
time, complete with a mockup of a
threshing machine on stage,
threshing hands climbing ladders,
walking between mows on 6eams
and creating as much of the
atmosphere of an old-fashioned barn
threshing as possible.
"It's a vivid memory — it's a
huge one for me," says Thompson of
his experience as a 13 -year-old
working at his first barn threshing.
The son of a Atwood -area
veterinarian, he had moved to Guelph
with his grandfather, mother and
sisters after his father died when he
was nine. But his uncles felt they had
a responsibility to "make a man of
me" he jokes so they took hire out to
the farm to work for three summers.
"This was just a huge vivid
memory doing the first threshing in
the barn with them," he recalls. "I
just went 'wow'. Initially, seen from
my perspective, the idea was 'could I
survive it?'
"Would anybody from Guelph
believe what I was doing and what
other people were supposed to do?"
he remembers thinking.
For younger generations the hell
that was the inside of a barn at
threshing is hard to envision. The air
is full of dust and noise and, because
of the season, heat. The young
Thompson was first put to work in
the granary, "which is a horrible job
and obviously people only do it when
they have to," but later he was
rotated to other jobs.
"I found my perfect calling in
life," says Thompson. "I was a
'pitcher'. I wasn't very tall but I
could throw as high as anyone else. It
was as close to sport as you could get
and I figured 'This is it. Finally I'm
useful. They'll realize how good at it
I am."'
Instead, however, his uncles
decided everybody should do all the
different tasks and sent him out to
"build" a wagon -load of sheaves. "I
seem to remember when the horses
turned the corner to come up the
gangway that it (the load) only hung
on by the merest thread." he
chuckles.
Part of the indelible memories of
the experience is also the world of
the men on the crew and the ribbing
the young man took in his unskilled
load -building efforts. •
Later in life, as he talked to other
people who had gone through the
experience of a barn threshing, he
found they too also had such vivid
memories of the event, that he
thought it must ring a bell with more
people. "It's not just about 12 to 16
people spending a day working really
hard and eating a lot of food and
trying to get one farm cleaned off to
move on to the next one. There was a
kind of key to the social order."
Thompson, who first came to
international prominence when he
directed The Farm Show about a
farming community near Clinton,
works in a form of theatre in which
there is no script. During the
rehearsal period, actors are asked to
research, then create characters in
improvisational situation as they
develop a final, polished form of the
show. In this case, with a shorter
rehearsal time, Thompson has
Threshing (seen here in a 1906
scene) was a time when the
dynamics of rural society were
displayed.
18 THE RURAL VOICE