Blyth Festival 2025: Bestselling author, screenwriter and Blyth Festival fan

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

While famed Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue has bestselling books, several prestigious literary awards and even an Academy Award nomination to her name, it is penning a play for her beloved Blyth Festival that she describes as being the project of a lifetime.

 

Fresh off of a three-day rehearsal period to kick off the production of the play, Donoghue said she was just thrilled with how things were coming together over what she described as “three heavenly days” in Blyth.

 

Her work in this season of the Blyth Festival comes as the playwright of The Wind Coming Over the Sea. Formally billed as an adaptation of a short story she wrote in the late 1990s, when the Dublin, Ireland native first came to Canada, Donoghue says she sees it as almost a revisitation. She wrote a short story in 1998 and then has now returned to those characters and written a play about them.

 

Donoghue was already an established author in her native Ireland when she moved to Canada. She married Christine Roulston, who is the professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario, and moved to London, Ontario in 1998. The couple still lives in London now with their two children. 

 

However, when Donoghue first came to Canada, she wanted to write about a similar experience and capture the stories of recent immigrants. While reading one day, she caught a footnote about a real-life Irish couple who sent letters to one another. They had made the difficult decision to immigrate to Canada, with Henry going ahead to find work, anticipating that his wife and young children would soon follow.

 

She found the letters from the 1800s, penned by these two lovers, at the Toronto Reference Library and was entranced by them, seeing the story unfold before her very eyes through just a handful of letters. She found their authenticity and poetic nature to be fascinating and was immediately intrigued.

 

Meanwhile, it was in 2000 that Donoghue discovered the Festival. Michael Healey’s The Drawer Boy was being produced in Blyth and she made the trip north to see it. Donoghue says she was immediately invested in the Festival, expecting a traditional summer theatre producing safe, established musicals and plays, and instead finding the country’s foremost purveyor of original Canadian plays. From then on, she was a patron and a big fan of the Festival.

 

However, it wasn’t until recently that a mutual friend of Donoghue’s and the Festival - Michael Milde, vice-president of the Blyth Centre for the Arts’ Board of Directors - suggested to Donoghue that she should write a play for the Blyth Festival. He connected Donoghue with Artistic Director Gil Garratt, she thought back to her beloved short story from so many years ago and the rest is history. 

 

They proposed a quick turnaround on the play and Donoghue got to work learning more about the couple she had written about back in the late 1990s. She wanted to expand her search and read letters from family members and others to widen the scope of the story. She returned to the Toronto Reference Library, where she was told the letters had been repatriated to Belfast, Northern Ireland, so, on a trip back, she went, only to find photocopies. Much to her surprise, she would find the originals in none other than the University of Western Ontario archives, in her hometown, in the same place that houses her own archives.

 

It should also be noted that Donoghue is no stranger to playwriting. She has written over 10 plays for the radio and the stage from the mid-1990s up to 2017 before her latest project for the Festival.

 

For the expansion of the story, Donoghue not only turned to further research material, but to music as well. She felt it should be largely musical, full of traditional Irish songs, but not ones that immediately come to mind for many. The songs she incorporated into the story are widely unknown and deal with the subjects of immigration, drinking, loss and grief and so much more.
In that three-day rehearsal period, and with the help of the great Anne Lederman, the show’s musical director, Donoghue said she was amazed at the speed with which the actors were able to put some of the music together. The skill level, she said, is astounding.

 

She also found the writing process to be exceedingly smooth. She said that the play was one of the easiest things she’s ever written because elements of the story just wrote themselves. Between that, the injection of music and helpful advice from Garratt, who will also be directing the show, it all came together quite naturally.

 

And while the process might have been smooth, Donoghue hopes that the message behind the show packs a punch and resonates not just as a story from the 1800s, but as one that’s more relevant now than ever. The story of immigration, people being distanced from their loved ones and the importance of family, love and human connection, she says, is always important and resonated then and when she first wrote the short story and continues to resonate now and forever.