This summer, Blyth Festival is thrilled to present the World Premiere of a new stage work from internationally acclaimed, best-selling author Emma Donoghue, THE WIND COMING OVER THE SEA, as part of its 51st season. On stage at the historic Blyth Festival Margaret Stephens Stage at Memorial Hall in a production directed by Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt running June 26th through August 12.

A folk musical incorporating traditional Irish and British ballads performed live on stage by the acting company, THE WIND COMING OVER THE SEA is a work of historical fiction inspired by the true story of Henry and Jane Johnson, who emigrated from the town of Antrim in Northern Ireland to Southwestern Ontario during the Great Famine of the 1840’s. A deeply moving tale of love and perseverance that interweaves music with text inspired by archival letters exchanged by the Johnsons, Donoghue’s play takes an unflinching look at a fundamental and ongoing piece of the story of Canada – the promise and peril of emigration. The World Premiere production will feature Landon Doak as Henry Johnson and Shelayna Christante as Jane Johnson.

An immigrant from Ireland herself, Donoghue first wrote about the Johnsons in a story entitled Counting the Days in 1998, the year she settled in Canada. When Henry Johnson first left Ireland for Canada by sea, over a year ahead of his wife Jane and their two young children, they corresponded through a series of letters which were kept and later published by various members of the Johnson family. The original letters are held in the Archives and Special Collections of Western University where Donoghue was at one point a writer in residence; almost every scene in Donoghue’s time capsule of a script springs from the lines found in these letters of love and longing exchanged between the young couple and dispatched across the ocean.

“When I first came to Canada, I found myself craving a sense of ancestry, so I started reading broadly about the great famine and the waves of emigration of which Canada is composed, and that’s how I came to discover the story of the Johnsons,” shares Donoghue. “Immigration has always been a complicated experience, there are always losses as well as gains and reality rarely aligns with promise. In that way the story of the Johnsons – this intimate and moving tale of a young couple making the passage from Ireland to Canada separately and struggling to reunite – is a timeless narrative of how people move around the world in search of the things we all want, safety, security, and a place to make a life.”

Donoghue was captivated by the emotion imbued in the letters and the care required to preserve them through generations: “The letters were so moving to me,” she adds. “I knew that Henry and Jane would have held onto them and carried them along on their journeys. They acted like a vector between these human beings, a kind of rope of love thrown from one to the next carrying Jane across the sea to Henry.”

“Blyth has always been interested in diaspora dialogues and really interrogating what the story of Canada is,” adds Garratt. “From early on Emma and I spoke about wanting to foreground the immigrant experience in the play—what immigration is and how Canada has been composed by it. What Emma’s play does so beautifully is point to the wider issue of immigration through an intimate, humanizing lens that reminds us that there is a story like Henry and Jane’s behind every person who’s ever come here. The play also preserves the beauty and poetry of the original letters, evoking the ephemeral nature of personal histories carried across time.”

Born in Dublin in 1969, Donoghue is a prolific novelist, screenwriter and playwright. Her internationally acclaimed book ROOM (2010) sold more than two million copies and won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and the Caribbean), as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film adaptation, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, and she also wrote the celebrated stage adaptation. Her book THE WONDER (2016) was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Donoghue co-wrote the 2022 screen adaptation for Netflix. 2020’s THE PULL OF THE STARS was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. THE WIND COMING OVER THE SEA is Donoghue’s seventh full length play.

A resident of London, Ontario since her arrival to Canada in the late 90’s, Donoghue has been a longtime patron of Blyth Festival. When her close friend, and Dean of Arts at Western University, Michael Milde joined the Blyth board, she mentioned to him that she had an idea for a play she thought would be perfect for the Festival. Milde connected her to Blyth Artistic Director Gil Garratt who soon commissioned the script.

Founded in 1975 with a mandate to produce and present the best in Canadian storytelling, in the course of its history Blyth Festival, nestled in the heart of Huron County, has produced 258 Canadian plays, 158 of which were World Premieres. The Festival has launched work that has gone on to tour the world and enter the canon of Canadian classics like Peter Colley’s I’LL BE BACK BEFORE MIDNIGHT and Michael Healey’s multi-award winning THE DRAWER BOY – named one of the Top Ten Plays of 2001 by Time Magazine. In this 51stt season Blyth is reviving another classic, premiered at the festival in 1981, Anne Chislett’s Governor General’s Award winning QUIET IN THE LAND. The organization currently also has 26 new Canadian plays in development under the creative guidance of Artistic Director Gil Garratt, who has led the company since 2014 . A director, playwright, dramaturge, Dora Award-winning actor, and theatre administrator who has worked across Canada and internationally, Garratt has dedicated his career to the development of new Canadian plays.

Joining Garratt on the creative team behind THE WIND COMING OVER THE SEA are Set and Lighting designer Ken MacKenzie, Costume Designer Meghan Choma, Sound Designer Adam Campbell, Music Director Anne Lederman, and Music Supervisor George Meanwell. The cast also includes Geoffrey Armour, Masae Day, and Festival veteran Michelle Fisk.

The 2025 Festival season runs June 18th to September 20th presenting five productions in total. For more information visit blythfestival.com.