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Behind a winter door: it's serious business when the mummers come a-knocking - Masquerade

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Autumn, 2002 by Gordon Jones

Everybody like to get dressed up in a costume and wear a mask, whether it's for Hallowe'en or New Year's or Mardi Gras.

Masquerade, done by ordinary people in their homes and on the streets, is one of the simplest and most powerful forms of theatre. It allows us to take on new identities, to subvert social rules, to laugh at ourselves and to emerge renewed.

In this special section Performing Arts looks at masqueraders from coast to coast, beginning with the ancient custom of mummering, still practiced in Newfoundland.

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ONCE UPON A CHRISTMASTIDE, A SMALL GROUP OF THE ATRICAL FRIENDS GATHERED AROUND A DOMESTIC HEARTH IN THE GEORGETOWN NEIGHBOURHOOD OF ST. John's for a reading of Dr. Faustus. As Marlowe's account of the doomed magus's downward spiral moved towards its relentless conclusion, there came a mighty knocking at the gate. Is this Faustus or the Scottish Play?

"Room, room, gallants, room." And in come the mummers, faces muffled and painted, outlandishly costumed in multicolored skirts, frock coats, long-johns, turned jackets, stuffed pants. Identity and gender obscured, the maskers stride in -- Father Christmas shouldering his club, King George with wooden sword, Turkish Knight brandishing scimitar, mountebank Doctor with little black bag, and skittish hobby-horse Old Ball, darting around, sniffing out badness from under his blanket, snapping wooden jaws lined with nails for teeth.

Welcome or welcome not, the mummers occupy parlour or kitchen, rearranging furniture, seizing pokers or pans as impromptu props, frightening the timid, challenging the bold, clearing space for their knockabout rendition of King George's battle with the Turkish Knight. Treacherously slain by his wily opponent, King George is restored to life by the ink-a-tink and turkey-baster of the mercenary Doctor -- miraculously resurrected to triumph over his foe the second time around.

Performance of the hero-combat folk play during the twelve days of the yuletide season is the most elaborate form of Christmas mummering in Newfoundland, although the custom can be as simple as disguised house-visiting with music, dancing and foolery (often called janneying). It would be pleasant to think these customs date back to Elizabethan times, seeded by the Morris dancers and hobby-horses that Sir Humphrey Gilbert brought with him on his 1583 voyage. But more likely the tradition was transplanted by nineteenth-century settlers from Ireland and the West Country.

Mummering has a boisterous history in Newfoundland. In the mid-1800s, mummers roved the streets of St. John's, sometimes attacking spectators or fighting with rival bands. In communities large and small, the anonymity conferred by disguise could provide the opportunity for settling personal, political or denominational grudges. In 1860, an allegedly sectarian mummering homicide provoked rioting in Bay Roberts.

As a result, the authorities took steps to curb saturnalian excess. In 1861, the Newfoundland legislature adopted an Act to Make Further Provision for the Prevention of Nuisances, decreeing that anyone "without a written Licence from a Magistrate, dressed as a Mummer, masked, or otherwise disguised, shall be deemed guilty of a Public Nuisance."

While disguised house-visiting nonetheless persisted in outport communities -- doubtless in a more law-abiding or, perhaps, more law-evading fashion -- performance of the hero-play itself died out in Newfoundland, probably some time between the two World Wars. Its revival in 1972 was the work of Chris Brookes and the agit-prop Mummers Troupe.

Drawing on the folkloric research of Memorial University's Herbert Halpert, George Story and others (Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland, 1969), as well as on Brookes's interviews with elderly residents of Port Kirwan, where performance of the play seems to have lingered longest, the Mummers Troupe created a composite (and exuberant) text of King George and the Turkish Knight, with which to wage yuletide guerilla theatre in downtown St. John's.

In his lively history of the Mummers Troupe (A Public Nuisance, 1988), Brookes records that five days before his mummers were about to burst into unsuspecting bourgeois parlours, he received a phone call from the Chief of Police to remind him that mummering was still illegal. They went ahead with it anyway, after promising (with fingers crossed) only to visit people they knew.

For the next ten years, the play was regularly performed throughout the Christmas season by a variety of players, including Tommy Sexton, Donna Butt, Rick Boland, David Ross, Rhonda Payne, Charlie Tomlinson, Greg Thomey and Beni Malone. With the disbanding of the Mummers Troupe in 1982, the tradition was fortunately maintained by high-school teacher Fabian O'Keefe, who took students mummering, using Brookes's text, first on Bell Island, then in Conception Bay South. At the 1988 launch of A Public Nuisance, in The Ship Inn, O'Keefe had the nerve to ask Brookes if he would come mummering with them. He said yes.

Behind a winter door: it's serious business when the mummers come a-knocking - Masquerade

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Autumn, 2002 by Gordon Jones

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