Blyth Festival 2025: A founder's voice returns to the Memorial Hall stage

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

It’s hard not to get overwhelmed when considering the impact that Keith Roulston has had not just on the world at large, but what he has meant to Huron County over the past 60 years. Having one of his plays back at the Blyth Festival this year feels like a tremendous tribute to someone without whom many of us wouldn’t be able to live out our dreams.

 

The Blyth Festival - which Roulston co-founded alongside Anne Chislett and James Roy all those years ago - produced Powers and Gloria in 2005 not knowing, surely, at the time how prescient and relevant it would continue to be 20 years later. 

 

When Powers, a local furniture magnate, is incapacitated by a stroke, he turns to a local caregiver to help him with his day-to-day needs. Two very different people, who would not have interacted much otherwise, then walk down a path together they would not have otherwise had to traverse. All the while, Powers, played by Randy Hughson, who directed the show in 2005, inhabits the immovable object of local, community-based manufacturing, while his son, Darryl, played by James Dallas Smith, takes on the unstoppable force of globalization, thinking bigger and a step towards succession that Powers doesn’t feel prepared to take.

 

Roulston was inspired by a real-life relationship he saw unfold at the time and spun it in to the tale that will be told on the

Memorial Hall stage later this summer. He found the relationship fascinating for all of the class-related reasons at play and wove in evergreen themes that he has so often explored in his writing - not just for the stage but as the founder of The Citizen, The Rural Voice and many other publications over the course of his career - of the meaning of community, its preservation and the way we need to all support one another if we want this harebrained experiment to work.

 

And while Roulston has many accolades to his name (at once, not enough), such as hall of fame spots and plays that have won awards and been produced overseas, he feels, in many ways, that Powers and Gloria is the best thing he’s ever written.
This comes after years of learning the art of playwriting on the fly. Roulston has always described himself as the local contact when it comes to the founding of the Festival, with two theatre professionals - Roy and Chislett - finding him as the person with local knowledge about Blyth and the state of Memorial Hall at the time. And yet, as the years went on, Roulston wrote several productions for the Festival. Many still resonate with audiences to this day, but Roulston admits that he was, to some degree, building the plane while flying it where writing plays was concerned. 

 

His first production, The Shortest Distance Between Two Points, was produced in 1977 as part of the third season of the Festival. His work was paying off, as Roulston was then produced again the following season with His Own Boss in 1978 and McGillicudy’s Lost Weekend in 1979 and Fire on Ice in 1981, which was a collective creation based on Roulston’s original script.

 

Roulston took a bit of a break, during which time he founded The Citizen alongside his wife Jill and community champions like Sheila Richards and others, before coming back in 1986 with one of the plays for which he will be best remembered: Another Season’s Promise, which he co-wrote with fellow Festival founder Anne Chislett.

 

The story goes that Chislett wanted to write about the crippling farming crisis at the time, with interest rates leading to families losing their farms. However, she didn’t understand the world of agriculture as well as she would have liked, so Roulston was brought on and it became clear very early that the two had a bond that would create great things. Roulston says he remembered being amazing at the pace at which Chislett would write. He would be working out a scene or doing some research and Chislett would just be tapping away at the keyboard, pumping out page after page.

 

But, experience after experience, play after play, Roulston felt that he was getting better and that the plays he was writing were improving. 

 

Another Season’s Promise would be remounted the following season and then be produced across the country and he wouldn’t have another play produced at the Blyth Festival until 1998’s Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and then McGillicuddy in 2001. After Powers and Gloria in 2005, Chislett and Roulston returned to the Purves family with Another’s Season’s Harvest in 2006, which is the last time a play of Roulston’s was produced at the building he helped to rehabilitate.

 

And now, with Powers and Gloria back on stage, being directed by the great Peter Hinton Davis, Roulston hopes his ode to looking beyond superficialities and assumptions will resonate with audiences and inspire empathy and kindness within them. In short, he hopes that people will look at their neighbours or other people in their communities with fresh eyes and be not so quick to judge a book by its cover.