The Wind Coming Over The Sea At The Blyth Festival

The Wind Coming Over the Sea, the heartbreaking, elegiac play by best-selling Canadian author Emma Donoghue (“Room”) marks yet another triumph for the Blyth Festival.

The Wind Coming Over the Sea tells the true story of Henry and Jane Johnson, Ulster Protestants who formed part of the wave of Irish emigration that took place both before and during the potato famine.

The Johnsons were Antrim grocers who, good Presbyterians that they were, extended credit to customers struggling during the famine years. Since no good deed goes unpunished, Henry was packed off to prison for not paying his debts to his suppliers.

His sentence over, Henry resolved to emigrate to Canada. He would go first and, once established, bring over Jane and his two “wee’uns,” Mary and Alex.

In spinning the tale of The Wind Coming Over the Sea, Donoghue draws on the surviving letters between Henry, Jane, and Jane’s father. She turns their untutored eloquence into monologues of piercing intimacy and longing.

Donoghue also makes liberal use of Irish music (she has described The Wind Coming Over the Sea as a “folk musical”) recognizing that music was one of the few things cash-strapped and desperate immigrants could bring with them from home. It buoyed their spirits and solemnized their sorrows. The device works brilliantly.

Canadians and Americans have been brought up with a mythology of the immigrant experience that leads us to believe that, yes, there were hardships, especially in “coffin ships” like the one that brought Henry to the New World, but that once in the promised land things looked up as the hard-working newcomers prospered to an extent unimaginable in the old country.

It wasn’t quite that simple and The Wind Coming Over the Sea serves as a bracing corrective. I don’t want to give away the narrative arc of Henry and Jane’s experience of Canada, so let me just say that unless you have a heart of stone, bring tissues. I sure could have used them.

The Wind Coming Over the Sea, dealing as it does with the immigrant experience, proves to be remarkably timely, which if you think about it, shouldn’t be all that surprising.

In one of many comic moments that punctuate Donoghue’s play one of those ever-so-polite Canadians we hear about rails at Henry for the way the Irish are destroying his country. As he storms off he shouts, “If it was up to me, I’d build a wall!”

Blyth Artistic Director Gil Garratt has directed The Wind Coming Over the Sea masterfully in what I am tempted call “the Blyth style.” The stagecraft is pared to a minimum (sets and lighting by Ken Mackenzie; Meghan Choma did the costumes; Adam Campbell the subtle sound design), with imagination playing the role that expansive budgets play elsewhere. Garratt has a wonderful instinct for the purely theatrical.

One of his most successful ideas is to bring a portion of the audience onstage, flanking the action, and providing more than a few opportunities for laughter, most of them involving unfortunate bodily functions.

Garratt has assembled a multi-talented cast that not only plays all the parts but plays the instruments that accompany the frequent musical passages. Everyone in The Wind Coming Over the Sea plays at least one instrument.

The singing is accomplished, the harmonies occasionally ravishing, but none of it is slick. That’s exactly as it should be I think. The effect is to make us feel we are witnessing a home-made rendition of a very intimate story of ordinary people told by those people themselves.

A perfect example of that is the fact that Garratt, ignoring Noel Coward’s warning, has cast his five-and-a-half-year-old daughter Gloria as Alex. She slips into her gender-bending role with all the aplomb of Seanna McKenna. Shockingly, she is uncredited in the programme. Garratt may hear more about that omission when the young lady comes of age.

The only performers who don’t play multiple parts are Landon Doak and Shelayna Christante, as Henry and Jane. They make for an achingly believable married couple torn apart by circumstance, perhaps in part because they are married in real life. Doak is especially effective in his rendition of “The Parting Glass.”

Of the four-person ensemble, George Meanwell, who doubles as music supervisor, stands out. He plays five very different instruments during the course of the play while playing roles as disparate as a stern Presbyterian minister and a salt-of-the-earth bachelor farmer.

Geoffrey Armour is impressive as Jane’s father, the McConnell patriarch, as well as in many other roles. Masae Day and Michelle Fisk excel on the distaff side.

I feel I may have left you with the impression that The Wind Coming Over The Sea is a real downer. So let me assure you that the play does have a happy ending, one that celebrates the many descendants of Jane Johnson, culminating in a joyful singalong that involves the entire audience.

I am fond of saying that these days you can toss a ham sandwich on the stage and it will get a standing ovation, but the ovation that the packed house at Blyth afforded The Wind Coming Over The Sea was utterly genuine and entirely deserved.

I will be intrigued to see what sort of afterlife the play has. Given the prominence of its author there will surely be a fair bit of interest.

The Wind Coming Over The Sea continues at the Blyth Festival through August 12, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Blyth Festival website.

Footnote: Here’s a fun fact: Huron County has a greater percentage of people with Irish, Scottish, and English roots, some 96%, than do Ireland, Scotland, and England today.

Footnote: The Blyth Festival has created a wonderful “Study Guide” for The Wind Coming Over The Sea. It is packed with links to further reading, to the music of Huron County, and much more. I highly recommend it.

Footnote: If you’d like to read the letters between Jane and Henry you can do so by following this link: https://www.dippam.ac.uk/ied/ Once there, you will have to poke about using the Search function to locate individual letters.

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