The Citizen-Blyth Festival, 1999-06-23, Page 40BLYTH FESTIVAL SALUTE, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 1999. PAGE 21.
Paul Thompson taps his rural roots again
11
Bits and
pieces
Paul Thompson has
been collecting bits
and pieces of a past
way of rural life as
he prepares to
create Death of the
Hired Man on the
Festival Stage.
Transforming
theatre to the inside
of a barn at
threshing time
Thompson will recall
a time when people
had to work
together.
was fascinated by country life,
something that didn’t really fit in
Stratford.”
That fascination he traces back
to his roots, which, despite his
cosmopolitan experiences, are
extremely rural. Having grown up
in the Atwood and Listowel area,
Thompson remembers summers on
his uncle’s farm. “I got sent off at
age 13 to become a man,” he
laughs. “Naturally, I wanted to do
something to reflect that important
imprint on youth.”
With Death of the Hired Man, he
hopes to show the audience the
generational change of
agricultural, the end of the horse
era and the beginning of modern
farming. "Death of the Hired Man
is more metaphorical. I’m trying to
capture that changing moment in
time. It’s that major paradigm, the
shift where within two to three
minutes someone’s mind can
change like this,” he says with a
sweep of his hands.
He is also hoping to capture for
the audience the physical sense of
those threshing days. “We have to
be the last play of the season
because we’re re-doing the theatre.
We’re trying to take the whole
place over.”
The plan is to transform
Memorial Hall into the interior of a
barn, with the sights, sounds and
perhaps even some of the
temperature to bring people into
the experience. “We may not have
the air conditioner running as
high.”
To the rhythm of the threshing
machine, Thompson plans to
entertain audiences z with his
glimpse of another era. “We hope
people will have a real feel about
what’s going on.”
BLYTH
FESTIVAL
’99
Ask Paul Thompson about
researching his new play Death of
the Hired Man, and his azure eyes
begin to sparkle.
With his ruddy complexion,
Thompson looks more like he’s
recently spent his time on the land
rather than hearing stories about it.
But in putting together his newest
collective production the director
has been avidly hunting out stories
and memorabilia of the threshing,
days.
“Everybody’s giving us the
gears, so to speak. How they mesh
in the show is anyone’s guess.”
Discussing his moments
revisiting the past, or the
agricultural relics he has received,
Thompson is animated. As he did,
the listener gets caught up in the
vivid recounting of life on the
threshing gangs or the harvest
excursions.
“Their memories are so fresh.
The people were very skilled
talking about that era and I hope
we will get a very strong resonance
of the detail of that. I am trying to
get very authentic voices telling
this story.”
The best way, he has discovered,
is listening to the local radio
station’s Swap Shop. “That has
become a necessary part of
rehearsal.”
Trying to “attach” the characters
in the play to real people is similar
to what Thompson created with his
benchmark collective The Farm
Show in the early 1970s.
Creating collective plays has
become Thompson’s trademark.
The road to his successes was
circuitous. “I fell into theatre while
learning to be a French teacher.”
Having graduated from the
University of Western Ontario
with an honours degree in English
and French, Thompson was
exasperated to find that while he
was “full of wonderful ideas, I was
incapable of expressing them in
French.”
A scholarship took him to the
Sorbonne at which time his interest
in theatre began to develop. “I used
it as a way of expressing myself,
but got hooked.”
He briefly returned to Toronto,
but was drawn back to Lyon to
train and direct.
Then it was as an assistant
director at Stratford Festival that
Thompson was enticed by the
collective idea. “I was prepared
with all the energy of the over
achiever. People said the things I
had done were alright, but I never
felt so. Then one day I didn’t have
time to prepare and as I was
watching the actors I thought what
do you do to use that stuff, the text
that evolves.”
One of those actors he was
keeping a close eye on was his
soon-to-be wife Anne Anglin.
The pair became part of an
emerging theatre group that didn’t
seem to fit. Thompson admits he
Death of the
Hired Man
A collective creation
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