1837: The Farmers' Revolt

Before the Blyth Festival was born, before the community saved the building, the first group of actors who rehearsed in Blyth Memorial Community Hall had to sign waivers in case the roof fell in on their heads. Well, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt was the show those actors were working on at the time, with a young, upstart, hardly known, and heavily bearded director named Paul Thompson.

This is an epic Canadian story about a rebellion whose reverberations helped build the very Canada we know today. At its core, this is a play about farmers who distrust the government of the day, and rise up to take them down. Fighting against a class of entitled would-be aristocrats, the farmers in the play are frontier people, eager to break the bonds of tyranny and forge their own country, free of British rule, and featuring incredible turns by the likes of local historic titans Van Egmond, Tiger Dunlop, and William Lyon MacKenzie.

As Garratt says, “this is a play that was born here, and helped inspire the creation of the Festival, and yet has never been produced on our main stage".