Artistic Director's Message

Whenever an artist is asked to describe the distinct quality of the Blyth Festival, the answer is consistent: “the audience”. When Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille landed here in 1972 and embarked on The Farm Show, they put an indelible stamp on theatre in this region. Through sheer audacity and tenacity, they forged a relationship with the rural audience. This relationship was based purely on trust – the trust that exists when a whole community sees its history onstage and understands that it has been treated with respect and compassion.

The Blyth Festival offers a professional repertory season of Canadian theatre to a surprisingly diverse audience, given the location of the village. Patrons visit the Blyth Festival to experience grassroots theatre that sticks to the company’s mission, giving “…voice to the region and the country.” Our adherence to this mission has always given the festival the distinction of creating theatre by, for and about the average Canadian. Yet there is nothing average about the art that we generate. It captures the essence of what it is to be Canadian. And that is, essentially, what the mission boils down to – a living answer to the single most troubling question in our culture: who are we? Most theatre companies could make the same statement, but the Blyth Festival’s audience and the larger theatre community expect us to pose this question specifically in the context of national and rural identities. Because this sensibility drives all of the productions, there is no room for waffling when creating work. It must speak to the people.

In Blyth, the integration of community and artists has been consistently innovative for thirty-three years. Since the earliest days of the festival, it has been our practice to gather resource material directly from the community. One need look no further than The Drawer Boy, The Tomorrow Box and He Won’t Come in from the Barn to see the community’s hand in the development of new work. And the interaction does not stop at the development stage. Productions such as The Outdoor Donnellys and Many Hands actually relied on an entire company of community players that shared an equal weight of responsibility with the professional actors. In the case of the Donnelly play, up to fifty community players performed in four vignettes that unfolded simultaneously in various locations around town. One of the greatest benefits of integrating the company with the community is that it breeds a sense of loyalty that is impossible to nurture in any other way. For an audience that is already proprietorial, this level of involvement creates a lifetime commitment.

Aside from the festival’s obvious distinction as a producer of scripts with rural themes, we are one of the only theatres of this size dedicated exclusively to Canadian work. There is a strong nationalist sense that ripples through the audience, proving time and again that the rural aesthetic of the festival belies a much larger impact.

On average, 50% of the new scripts that we premiere go on to multiple productions elsewhere. Of all our achievements, the ongoing success of plays developed in Blyth is the most significant.

Artistic Director - Eric Coates