Blyth Festival at 50: Roulston looks back at the founding of an institution
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
As the story goes, James Roy, Anne Chislett, and Keith Roulston came together in the Village of Blyth in 1975 and hatched a radical and innovative idea - to create a rural theatre festival that would enrich the lives of its audience and give a voice to the community. But the full story of the Blyth Festival actually began decades earlier - in 1920, the year that the cornerstone of Blyth’s Memorial Hall was laid. Because, without Memorial Hall, there would be no Blyth Festival.
The construction of the stately space came about as part of the local community’s collective dream - to honour the brave men and women who had served in World War I, which later expanded to include those who served in World War II. First and foremost, Memorial Hall has always been a living cenotaph designed with the intention of honouring the unassailable spirit of those who fought, by giving the community a place to gather, and be entertained, together. Now, over 100 years later, the hall and the people that populate it still strive to fulfill that dream.
Lucknow-area native Keith Roulston has capably served the Blyth Festival in many capacities over the years. He was the first-ever chair of the Festival’s board of directors, has written numerous well-received plays, and served several stints as its general manager. Over the course of many decades, as various artistic directors came and went, Roulston remained the Festival’s consistent connection to the local community. But when he first encountered Memorial Hall in 1971, Roulston was on the hunt for captivating content he could use in the pages of the local newspaper that he had just taken over. “When we bought the old Blyth Standard, we were taking over a paper that was printed in the old letterpress way, so there were no pictures in it,” he recalled. “I wanted to get pictures. I wanted to knock people on their rear-ends right off the bat with the pictures that we took!”
He didn’t know it at the time, but the paper’s offices were located just a few steps away from Blyth’s long-running event space. “I heard that there was a variety concert going on at a place called Blyth Memorial Hall, which I had never heard of before.”
Roulston grabbed his camera and headed to the hall in hopes of capturing some entertaining images worthy of the front page. The moment he stepped into the building, he saw a future in it. “I looked around, and I was just so impressed with this building, even though it was in god-awful shape. The curtains? There were no curtains. There were flats on the stage so [people] didn’t fall through... I started thinking that it was too bad that such an old building was not being used more - that it should be something.”
Roulston may be best known as a local boy who grew up with a penchant for founding newspapers, but his second-most-pressing passion was born while he was out in the world, seeking an education. “I had fallen in love with theatre when I was going to Ryerson in Toronto. The Royal Alex had just been sold to Ed Mirvish, and he was always bringing in touring shows, and he couldn’t always sell all the seats that were there, so he came to Ryerson and offered all the extra tickets to the Radio and Television Arts (RTA) department. I had a roommate that was in RTA, and he got tickets for both of us to go to the shows.”
Roulston quickly settled into his new role running the local newspaper. “I became good friends with Helen Gowing who ran the needlecraft shop... there was still a Blyth Fall Fair in those days, and the next summer, Murray Scott, the president of the Blyth Fall Fair, came to Helen, and said that the [Canadian National Exhibition (CNE)] in Toronto had just started up a Queen of the Fair competition, and they wanted all the rural fairs across Ontario to have their own Queen competitions and send their winners to the CNE.”
Roulston thought that Memorial Hall would be the perfect place for Blyth’s Queen competition, and he and Gowing set about making it so. “We had a whole bunch of volunteers that went in and started to clean things up, and we cleaned out the whole place, and so on,” he explained. At that time, the team may not have had an exact vision in mind for the hall’s future, but the members shared a common desire. “We dreamed of making it into some place that could be used.”
Just when it seemed like that dream was about to become a reality, conflict arose. “Irvin Bowes was the fire chief of Blyth when it was still its own village. He read what we were doing, and he said ‘I’ll let you have this event, but you can’t keep on using Memorial Hall for any more than that, until you get a proper fire escape. We had found the money for paint and cleaning and so on, and so forth, but we didn’t have the whole $35,000 that was needed - that was big money in those days, and we didn’t have any access to funds like that.”
Around the same time, Roulston was covering the monthly meeting of the Federation of Agriculture for The Blyth Standard. Fortuitously, one such meeting fell on the same day as a street fair run by the Clinton branch of the Lions Club. “While I was there, I ran into Jim Fitzgerald, who had taken over the Clinton News-Record, which I had been the editor of before I came north to Blyth. I had read a story in his paper - that there was a group of actors west of Clinton who were researching a show that they were going to do about the community. And then along came Paul Thompson, at this street fair we were at, and Jim introduced me to him. I kept telling him about what we were doing in Blyth, and how he should come back and do stuff at Blyth Memorial Hall. And so I ended up going when they had The Farm Show in the barn - I saw the very first performance of it. Little did I know that James Roy was also there - he saw the show too.”
Roulston remembers his first experience with The Farm Show vividly. “I knew some of the people that were portrayed on the stage. They had a luncheon afterwards for all the neighbours - it was the cast’s chance to show off what they had worked on after talking to them while they researched the show... it was pretty magical. Especially because I took my wife, Jill, and our oldest daughter. We sat in the haymow, in the old barn, and Christina was two, playing around in the hay.” Romping around with Roulston’s daughter was Paul Thompson’s daughter, Severn Thompson, who now works for the Festival, as well as future Blyth Festival artistic director Janet Amos’ son, Christopher.
While Roulston was observing the birth of The Farm Show in a barn in Clinton, Blyth’s theatrical future was still hanging on the balance of a busted fire escape. “Finally,” continued Roulston, “the council came up with enough money to build the fire escape. But then somebody said, ‘well, that building was built in 1920, Lord knows what the wiring is like - we better make sure that that’s safe’. And so an inspector took a look, and he said ‘it’s not great... but it’s not unsafe.’ So then, it seemed that we were all set to get the fire escape built.”
But then complications escalated, and the stakes were suddenly higher. “Another councillor, who happened to be a builder, looked at the roof and said ‘I think there’s a sag in that roof - I think we need to investigate that.’ So then we brought in an engineer, and we found out they’d poorly designed the roof - one roof ran into the other, and so the roof wasn’t safe - it had to be replaced. And the first quote they had was $75,000, and that was not going to fly with anybody.” A new quote, for a marginally more manageable $50,000, was brought forth. Members of the community rallied around the effort. “Finally, the Women’s Institute (WI) came forward, and they were very supportive - they thought something should happen there. They were the group who were behind the building of Memorial Hall in the very first place. They said, ‘This is the memorial for the soldiers of two World Wars - we’ve got to fix this up.’” This impassioned assertion from the WI reached the ears of the local council. “Eventually, in the fall of 1974, council agreed to replace the roof on it. If you look at The Blyth Standard in the fall of 1974, you can see photos where they were tearing off the roof.”
The repairs took time, however, and Roulston felt that he may have missed his chance to bring Paul Thompson back to town. “By this time, Theatre Passe Muraille had given up on Blyth, and they had gone and set up in Petrolia. But then, that winter, after James Roy had graduated from York University, he went to Passe Muraille, and did a show there. Afterwards, he was talking to Paul, and told him he really wanted to start a summer theatre.” Thompson promptly advised Roy to get in touch with Roulston. “I got a letter from James, and that’s where it all began.”
The people of Blyth had worked so hard together to revive their beloved performance space, and entrusted Clinton’s own James Roy to provide programming guidance as its first-ever artistic director. Roulston thinks it was the right move. “That very first season, when we had decided we were going to go ahead and have a theatre, it was all in James’ hands as to what was going to go on the stage. He came in, and he’d just been at his mother’s place, and he certainly remembered the books of Harry J. Boyle. He got the books off the shelf, and he thought ‘yeah, there’s stuff here we can do a play out of.’ And so he came to me with the idea, and I thought it was wonderful.” The play that was born of that idea, Mostly in Clover, was the Festival’s first original production, and its first smash hit. “And that made James’ mind up - from then on, he was going to do only Canadian plays, or only plays that had a local bearing.”
On the opening night of Mostly in Clover, there was no seating in the balcony due to the continued lack of a working fire escape for that portion of the building. There was also no air conditioning. “It turned out to be a hot night, and the dedication ceremony ran long,” Roulston recalled. “It went on and on and on, and the heat went up and up and up - people were starting to stick to the wooden seats, and the cast was backstage, and they were so hot! They kept asking ‘are we going to do this?’ Finally, all the ceremonies were over, and they started the show! And there was a first laugh, and a second laugh, and it just built, and built, and built, and there was a standing ovation at the end.... A big friend of the Festival was Jim Swan, who was at the CKNX radio and television station. He came that night, and he had a recorder, and he interviewed all of the actors who were in the cast. After he finished that, everybody went downstairs, and there was a big party. When we were heading out afterwards, I remember Robbie Lawrie - who was the reeve of the village at that point, stopped me and said ‘I think you’ve got a hit there.’ By the end of the season, that show was selling out all the performances. The word of mouth had gone around, and we did an interview in the paper and so on.”
Roulston’s own foray into playwriting came about shortly thereafter. “Probably, with Paul Thompson being around, I got interested in telling stories. I finished my first play while James Roy was here, and I showed it to him, and he was kind of interested, but it needed to be worked on, so we reworked it, and it was put on in 1977, at the very end of the season. There were six performances, or something like that. And I was so broken-hearted that that was all it was going to get.” That play, The Shortest Distance Between Two Points, tells the tale of the residents of a fictional small town that’s found itself in the middle of a government plan to construct a highway right through the middle of town. It may have had a short first run, but The Shortest Distance Between Two Points has since been remounted elsewhere.
Once he started writing plays, Roulston found it was hard to stop. “I wrote three while James Roy was here. I wrote something else that Janet put on, but I don’t claim it now, because it got reworked so much. Anne Chislett and I wrote a play together called Another Season’s Harvest, about the farming crisis of the 1980s, when the price of farmland had gone suddenly a lot higher, and the interest rates went up to something like 20 per cent. And so farmers that had bought land, and thought that they had a mortgage that was going to do, and the mortgage became renewed, the interest rate was now so high there was no way they could keep a hold on that land. Up in Bruce County, the bank was coming in and taking over some of the farms from the farmers that were there. They had penny auctions, and people would buy the farm for a fraction of what they’re worth, and the police were involved, and so on and so forth. I did all the research on that, and Anne did a lot of the writing, and we created this play, which was a mammoth hit.” Another Season’s Harvest returned for a second year, and later went on a national tour. Roulston and Chislett revisited that play for the farm crisis of the 1990s and early 2000s in what became Another Season’s Promise.
In the fall of 1979, James decided to leave the Blyth Festival, and Janet Amos took over as its artistic director. At that point, the Festival had become popular enough that it needed to hire its first full-time general manager. Roulston applied for the job, and landed the position. Thus ushered in the era of Janet Amos as artistic director. Roulston recalls that time fondly. “She was so dedicated. The irony was that Janet was a downtown Toronto girl, but she became so Huron County. She came to perform in The Farm Show, and then she married Ted Johns, who was a Huron County boy. So she took over, and was going out, and researching plays, and finding stories to tell, and she brought Ted, who got into writing big time - they built a huge audience.”
After Amos moved on, Katherine Kaszas moved in. “Katherine was not from Huron County, but she came and lived in Huron County.” Roulston remembers her reign as a time of rapid growth. “James built it this big,” he gestured, “and then Janet built it bigger. Katherine came along and built it to the next level. Huge, huge, huge attendance. Katherine was also in charge of building what we call ‘The Link’, which is that whole part that has the art gallery in it, and attaches to where the offices are. Huge growth when Katherine was here.”
The end of the Kaszas age brought about a new kind of leader in the form of Peter Smith - a somewhat tumultuous, but interesting time period for the Blyth Festival. “Peter was a little unfocused. The theatre had built itself way up, so when Peter did some shows that weren’t popular with people, they ran into a huge deficit.... That’s when the chair of the board came to me and to James Roy - I was running The Citizen by that point - and asked us to come and talk about how to get things back on track. So I came back on board, and James, and Jim Swan, and Paul Thompson were on the board, and we approached Janet about coming back for the second time.” Amos agreed, under the condition that Roulston would be president of the board. “So I spent another four years as her president... she rebuilt the Festival - it had gone right down.”
When Amos decided her second run had come to its natural conclusion, Anne Chislett stepped up to the plate. She hired Eric Coates as an actor, and eventually offered him the job of assistant artistic director. “She really came to trust Eric,” Roulston remarked. Coates eventually went on to succeed Chislett as artistic director - a position he held from 2003 to 2012. They didn’t always see eye to eye creatively, but Roulston grew to respect the man’s dedication to both the Festival and the community. “Coates threw himself into it - he was so involved. He came from Stratford - he had family there, he had a house there - but he wanted to be in Blyth as much as possible. He was dedicated to the community. For instance, he would always get his hair cut in Blyth. So he was going to the barber, and catching up on the community based on what the barber had picked up at the shop. He was just so involved.”
When Coates vacated the position for greener pastures, Smith returned as the interim artistic director. “Eric had picked most of the season before he left. So [Smith] was in charge of making sure the directors were hired and the actors were hired... while he was here, he was also involved in the renovation project to bring Memorial Hall up to 2014 standards.”
Following Smith’s brief return to the chair, frequent Blyth collaborator Marion de Vries took the reins. “She came in, and she was just thrown into the middle of it. She was planning a second season, which I was going to have a play in, but then they replaced her with Gil Garratt. He’s been in a difficult era, with the pandemic and that. You look around the country, and that was just the end of a lot of theatres - Gil successfully built the Harvest Stage during that time.”
In Roulston’s opinion, the global pandemic isn’t the only factor making it harder for festivals like Blyth to survive - there’s also been a shift in the way people receive information that makes it harder to get the word out. “It’s more difficult for the Festival, because they don’t have people coming from the Signal-Star and the News-Record to write reviews anymore. We used to give tickets away to all the editors of the papers, and they’d come and write reviews, so it’s a bigger challenge than ever for them to get an audience.”
Despite those challenges, this local legend isn’t worried about the future of Memorial Hall and the festival it houses. “To some extent, it’s magic, you know. What makes it work? The fact that it tells local stories about local people, for local people. That has always been a big part of it. It’s not like going to Stratford and seeing Shakespeare, or a reenactment of a play that was first done 500 years ago - these are plays that are happening today about people that you know, today. And part of it is that there’s something about Blyth - it’s a special place. We’re just happy to see our stories being told - the stories that needed to be told, but wouldn’t be told otherwise.”