Before Blyth Could Choose Its Plays, It Had to Fix the Roof

Before Blyth could decide what stories to put on stage, it had to make the stage usable. In a 2025 recollection, festival co-founder Keith Roulston described trying to bring Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille to Memorial Hall after seeing The Farm Show in 1972. Building-safety work prevented those plans from going ahead in both 1973 and 1974. Thompson instead made Petrolia his summer base. [1]

That is a less tidy beginning than a successful festival looking back on its founding might suggest. The artistic idea was already there. The available room was not enough: it had to be a room people could safely use.

Entertainment was in the original plan

Memorial Hall had not been built as an empty shell waiting for professional theatre. Its opening was set for June 5, 1921, in remembrance of local First World War losses. An announcement reproduced on the Veterans Affairs Canada memorial inventory paired the Sunday ceremony with three evenings of entertainment immediately afterward. [2]

The same record reproduces a 1920 newspaper description of the planned building. It included an auditorium and stage, but also council accommodation and a fire hall below. Commemoration and ordinary community use were not separate phases in this plan. They were designed into the same building. [2]

There is an important limit to this evidence. Veterans Affairs identifies the inventory as crowd-sourced and reproduces the local storyboard's historical newspaper extracts. It is not an independent inspection of the original newspapers. Still, those attributed announcements give a concrete meaning to a memorial intended to be used: the ceremony had a date, and the entertainments already had their evenings.

Keeping a room available

The obstacle in the early 1970s was physical. In Architectural Conservancy Ontario's ACORN magazine, Peter Smith describes a deteriorating hall whose future was in doubt. One proposal would have supported the roof with posts running from the lower hall through the theatre floor. [3]

A building might remain standing that way, but the proposal shows why preserving a structure and preserving its usefulness are different questions. A theatre is not simply an enclosed volume. The space within it matters.

Roulston recalls that the theatre became available after the roof was replaced. His later account is a participant's memory, not a construction log, but it connects the repair directly to the opportunity that followed. [1]

Then came a different kind of uncertainty

Once a season was possible, the question changed from the roof to the audience. Roulston says James Roy wanted Canadian material and turned to Harry J. Boyle's writing about local rural life. Uncertain whether that subject would draw an audience, Roy also programmed Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. [1]

The festival's own production archive confirms the pairing in 1975: The Mousetrap and Mostly in Clover. It credits the latter to Boyle, adapted by Roy, Steven Thorne and the original cast. Mostly in Clover appears again in the 1976 list. The archive does not supply comparative ticket sales; it does show that the local work was not confined to a single season. [4]

That distinction keeps the story from becoming a convenient fable about a guaranteed audience. The inaugural programme included both a familiar title and local material. Repair had made the choice possible; it had not made its outcome certain.

Smith's 2017 account describes another major refurbishment decades later, including renewed theatre floors, lighting and sound systems. Continued use required more than one rescue. The hall's cultural work depended on practical work returning when it was needed. [3]

Blyth's story is therefore not only about finding local lives worthy of a stage. It is also about keeping a stage available for them. The roof does not appear in the cast list, but it belongs in the history.