4th Line Theatre is mourning the death of founder Robert Winslow, a playwright, actor, director, and artistic leader whose vision transformed his family’s Millbrook farm into one of Canada’s most distinctive outdoor theatre companies.
kawarthaNOW learned that Winslow, who was in his mid 70s, passed away unexpectedly in Peterborough after participating in a hockey game on Saturday morning (September 12).
4th Line Theatre managing artistic director Kim Blackwell confirmed Winslow’s death late Sunday, with Blackwell and board chair Ally Pyle issuing a media release on Monday.
“Robert was the driving force behind 4th Line Theatre for decades,” Pyle said in the release. “His vision for collecting and creating local stories set the benchmark for everything the theatre has become. His loss is immeasurable.”
“Robert was still actively researching and writing plays right up until the day before his death,” Blackwell added. “He was always excited to be gathering stories and bringing the history of Millbrook and area to life. He was my mentor and artistic collaborator for 34 years. Our loss is Canadian theatre’s loss as well.”
For more than three decades, Winslow’s work at 4th Line Theatre gave local history a living, breathing presence. On the outdoor stages of Winslow Farm on Zion Line, he helped create a theatre experience unlike any other: stories rooted in this region, staged in the landscape that inspired them, and brought to life by professional and community performers working side by side.
Winslow founded 4th Line Theatre with The Only Café owner Jerome Ackhurst in 1992, two years after Winslow inherited the 100-acre farm that had been in his family since the 1880s. Raised on the property but not a farmer himself, Winslow saw an opportunity to transform its fields, barns, and rolling landscape into a place where local stories could be told on an epic scale.
4th Line Theatre opened with The Cavan Blazers, Winslow’s first full-length play which explored the conflict between Protestant and Catholic Irish settlers in 19th-century Cavan Township. It became 4th Line’s signature work, returning to the stage repeatedly over the years and establishing the model that would guide the company: deeply researched, locally connected, environmentally staged historical drama.
“It created the standard that we’ve followed ever since,” Winslow said of the play during a 2023 interview with kawarthaNOW. “If you’re going to write a play for 4th Line, you’ve got to do a certain amount of research. You maybe should try to find a local connection. All the different elements that make 4th Line unique were in that first play.”
That commitment to listening, research, and community memory became central to Winslow’s work. He understood that history lived not only in archives and books, but in the recollections of people who had lived it or carried family stories forward. Community reminiscence sessions helped shape a number of 4th Line productions, drawing together local voices and ensuring that the theatre’s work was both historically grounded and emotionally present.
Over his theatre career spanning more than 45 years, Winslow worked as a playwright, actor, director, and artistic director. He began at the Peterborough Theatre Guild as a prompter in 1978, making his first on-stage appearance the following year in Arsenic and Old Lace. After developing his craft at Theatre Trent, he went to Edmonton in 1982 to work professionally in theatre.
His performing career then took him across Canada, the United States, and Britain, with credits that included the Blyth Festival and Edmonton’s Theatre Network, Northern Lights, Citadel Theatre, Catalyst, Nexus Theatre, and Fringe Festival productions.
In 1988, he founded East City Productions in Peterborough, an improvisational theatre company where he began directing and writing for the stage, and was also a founding member of the artist-run The Union Theatre Collective in Peterborough.
At 4th Line Theatre, Winslow wrote or co-wrote 18 original plays presented at Winslow Farm, also directing and performing in most of them. His writing credits include Gimme That Prime Time Religion, Cavan Casanova, Two Rounds and a Square, Fair Play, The Bell of Batoche, The Orchard, The Winslows of Derryvore, The Last Green Hill, Welcome Death, and The History of Drinking in Cavan.
Among his most significant collaborations were Doctor Barnardo’s Children, Wounded Soldiers, Crow Hill: The Telephone Play, and Carmel, created with local historian Ian McLachlan. Those works, and others, explored the lives of people too often absent from conventional histories while finding universal themes in local experience.
Winslow also brought remarkable openness to his work. In The History of Drinking in Cavan, he combined two centuries of local stories about alcohol with personal experience, writing, directing, and performing in a work that was at once funny, painful, and deeply human. It reflected a quality that audiences came to recognize in his work: an ability to find both humour and heartache in the stories closest to home.
Winslow’s legacy extends well beyond the plays he wrote and the roles he performed. Under the company he created, 4th Line Theatre offered opportunities to generations of young people through apprenticeships, training, scholarships, and mentorship. By the company’s 30th anniversary, around 2,000 young people had participated in 4th Line apprenticeships. The establishment of the “30 to the Future” endowment fund was intended to help sustain that work for years to come.
As well as being named a Paul Harris Fellow by the Rotary Club of Peterborough Kawartha, Winslow was honoured with the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 2002. Four years later, he was inducted into the Peterborough and District Pathway of Fame. In 2018, he received the Outstanding Senior Artist award at the inaugural Peterborough Arts Awards, organized by the Electric City Culture Council (EC3).
The following year, he was inducted into the Junior Achievement Peterborough, Lakeland, Muskoka Business Hall of Fame, recognizing not only of his artistic contribution but of the role 4th Line Theatre has played in the region’s cultural and economic life.
As he noted at the time, the honour affirmed that the arts are an economic engine for the area.
Winslow was also an instructor in Trent University’s Cultural Studies Department for more than two decades.
After passing the reins of artistic director to Kim Blackwell in 2014, Winslow remained an active presence at 4th Line Theatre until his death. In the company’s 2026 season, he was credited as founder and appeared as an actor in Schoolhouse, continuing a lifetime of showing up for the work, the stories, and the community that surrounded them.
Winslow leaves behind a body of work that changed how this region sees its own history. Through his imagination, the barns and fields of Winslow Farm became a stage where the past could speak, local stories could matter, and audiences could see themselves reflected in the landscape around them.
Robert Winslow is survived by his wife, Janette Froncz Winslow, as well as by many cousins, nephews, a niece, and other family members. Details regarding a celebration of Winslow’s life will be announced at a later date.
This story has been updated with a correction. The hockey game in which Winslow played took place Saturday morning, not Saturday evening.
