For renowned author and playwright Emma Donoghue, The Wind Coming Over the Sea is more than a new play—it’s a personal, musical excavation of immigration, longing, and love, brought to life on the Blyth Festival stage in its world premiere this summer. Running June 26 to August 12, the production marks a major new work by the Room and The Wonder writer, blending archival history with ballads and a timeless tale of separation and survival.
“I’m, as you can imagine, extremely excited about my live show,” says Donoghue. “Lots of opportunities for people to make it out to Blyth, which I know is not very near to anything, but it is outstanding theatre once you get there.”
The Wind Coming Over the Sea is based on a short story Donoghue penned in 1998, the year she emigrated from Ireland to Canada. Counting the Days is a story focused on one moment: Jane Johnson’s voyage from Ireland to Canada during the Great Famine of the 1840s. But Donoghue found herself unable to let the Johnson’s story go.
“With that short story, which is only about a very narrow slice of their lives… the couple, the Johnsons, you know, stuck in the back of my mind,” she says.
When Michael Milde, then Dean of Arts at Western University and a Blyth board member, suggested that she write something about Irish immigrants, Donoghue had her full-circle moment and returned to the Johnsons. The floodgates opened.
“Suddenly I remembered the Johnsons and thought, you know what—their bigger story, the whole story of their marriage and their journeys to Canada—that could make a really good piece of theatre,” says Donoghue. “And almost immediately, I thought, it needs music.”
If one writes an Irish folk tale, it’s not hard to imagine it being set to music.
“If you think of Irish immigrants and what they carried with them, you think of stories and letters… but you immediately think of songs as well,” Donoghue says. “So I thought, this needs to be a folk musical.”
The play incorporates traditional Irish and British ballads performed live on stage, woven into a dramatic narrative shaped around the real letters exchanged between Henry and Jane Johnson—letters now preserved in the archives at Western University in London, Ontario, where Donoghue also lives.
Though the script draws from these historic documents, Donoghue didn’t simply lift letters for the stage.
“I don’t use any complete letters as monologues,” she explains. “Even though the Johnson letters are very eloquently written… any real letter is just sort of messy compared with what you want. So I would say I use lots of individual sentences, but I really shaped them so that things happen at the right time dramatically.”
She also borrowed from the wider collection—letters from Jane’s sisters and father, piecing together the social and emotional backdrop of their Presbyterian community.
“They had this very tough, stoical view of life,” Donoghue says. “At one point, her father writes to her and says, it doesn’t really matter where we pass this brief life, so long as we’re all together in heaven with our treasure heaped up there.”
Donoghue’s own story adds a poignant dimension to the project. Her exploration of the Johnsons’ journey coincided with her own immigration to Canada.
“I was specifically looking for ancestors,” she says. “Not my personal Donoghue ancestors, but I was looking for people who had made this journey before me. I found that hugely helpful in moving to Canada, to feel that I was part of a tradition over the centuries.”
That personal connection shaped her interpretation of the Johnsons’ struggle but also her view of immigration—then and now still a monumental issue.
“What makes The Wind Coming Over the Sea really urgent, I would say, is that immigration is so under attack,” she says. “Especially south of our border, but even in Canada. And I think highlighting the vulnerability and courage and sacrifice of immigrants is more relevant than ever.”
Donoghue drew explicit parallels between 19th-century suspicion toward newcomers and today’s headlines.
“All these sneers and accusations… they’re just timeless in the long history of immigration,” she says. “You know, the idea that you should have stayed home, or that you’re bringing disease or germs… they’re all in the play.”
Bringing the production to life has been a collaborative joy, Donoghue says, praising director Gil Garratt and the Blyth Festival team.
The musical features a small cast of six actor-musicians performing live. And the immersive experience doesn’t end with the music. For each production, 26 audience members on stage for each performance.
For Donoghue, The Wind Coming Over the Sea is more than a historical tale—it’s a universal story about migration, love, and what it means to start over.
“They will be surprised that a story from a century and a half ago feels so absolutely relevant to today,” she says. “It could easily be a story of Ukrainians or Syrians—exactly the same dilemmas and terrors and family love motivate immigrants in every era.”
For tickets and further information about The Wind Coming Over the Sea check out the Blyth Festival website.
