Cast members George Meanwell, left, Shelayna Christante, Michelle Fisk and Landon Doak rehearse a song from The Wind Coming Over The Sea.The Globe and Mail
On an unseasonably cold, rainy late-May morning, a group of actors and musicians gathered at the Blyth Festival’s rehearsal space to sing a lullaby.
The Connemara Cradle Song, a 19th-century Irish tune, was being prepared for the coming production of The Wind Coming Over the Sea, a new play from Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue. The song’s lyrics, which include the play’s title, implore their subject to sleep restfully, speaking of a day when “Daddy goes sailing no more.” It’s early in rehearsals for the play, which has its premiere at the Blyth Festival on June 25. But the chemistry – and, indeed, the spring chill-busting warmth – of the show’s cast and crew is evident. So, too, is Donoghue’s appreciation for the material: As the company fine-tunes and repeats the song, Donoghue gently rocks to the tempo, singing along.
“I didn’t know a lot of these songs before I wrote the show,” Donoghue said during a break from rehearsal. She added that the song will appear in the play not purely as a lullaby, but as a wistful, longing tune tied into the narrative of its two lead characters, Henry Johnson and Jane Johnson, Northern Irish emigrants who moved to Ontario during the Great Famine of the 1840s.
Emma Donoghue.The Globe and Mail
If Donoghue is not so familiar with the music of The Wind Coming Over the Sea, she makes up for that with her closeness to these two characters. The Johnsons were the stars of her short story Counting the Days, published in 1998; that story was inspired by a continuing correspondence between Henry and Jane that she found in the archives of Western University in the late 1990s, shortly after she had herself emigrated to Canada from Ireland.
The idea to transform the Johnsons’s story into a play came somewhat indirectly: Her partner, Chris Roulston, is an associate professor at Western University; Michael Milde, who sits on the Blyth Festival’s board, is a former arts and humanities dean at Western. “Michael said to me, well, is there any chance you’d write for us,” Donoghue recalled, “and would you write about Irish immigrants?”
“I immediately thought of the Johnsons,” she continues. Counting the Days was focused largely on Jane’s ship coming to Canada, which, Donoghue said, “was a very narrow slice of their life. I had not explored their whole background.” In the play, she said, she’s “being totally true to the specifics of their case.”
That case being, on paper, fairly straightforward: Henry left Ireland 18 months before Jane to settle down; Jane, at home with a new baby, prepared for her new life abroad. The play fills in the emotional and contextual time with Donoghue’s evocative script, as well as live traditional Irish folk ballads worked into the narrative by Donoghue. Take the Connemara Cradle Song, for example: The song does indeed appear early in the play as a lullaby, and then reappears later, its nautical references emphasized to underscore the length of time Henry and Jane have been separated by the sea.
“It’s funny: As long as I lived in Ireland, I had no love for these songs,” Donoghue said. “And then I left. I remember hearing Danny Boy being played on the saxophone on the London Underground, and I was just overwhelmed with grief – specifically, an emigrant’s grief.”
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As an Irish immigrant to Southwestern Ontario, Donoghue does feel a kinship with the Johnsons – since first learning of their correspondence nearly three decades ago, she has visited transcripts of their letters in Belfast and Toronto, as well as in London, Ont., the latter two visitations made as part of a lengthy goose chase to find their original hard copies. “The letters are beautifully written in themselves,” said Donoghue, adding that while she does quote from some of them verbatim in her script for her new play, she was more likely to use ideas than actual phrases.
Donoghue also had the good fortune of being able to hold a blanket made by Jane herself, during a visit to the Museum of Strathroy.
“One of the greatest privileges of working on this piece has actually been to watch Emma’s curiosity,” said Gil Garratt, the Blyth Festival’s artistic director, who is also directing The Wind Coming Over the Sea. “Every time that she’s encountered another thing that they did, another piece that they touched, another object that they made, there’s this jubilance that’s just thrilling. To watch an artist get lit up like that is always amazing.”
Donoghue and Blyth Festival artistic director Gil Garratt speak with cast members during rehearsal.The Globe and Mail
Despite the jubilance at developing and growing closer to the real-life people behind her characters, Donoghue is quick to note that the Johnsons’s story is one of immigrants entering a foreign land with trepidation, and not always receiving a warm welcome – a story that is as resonant today as ever, if not more so.
“I’m delighted to be doing a play that documents and celebrates the immigration process, not as some kind of triumphant settler thing,” she said, “but the sheer vulnerability, fragility and toughness of immigrants of all kinds throughout the centuries.”
