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

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.

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.

Co-ordinated by O'Keefe and former student Michael Rossiter, with an overlapping splinter group of university students (led by Rossiter), the core of today's mummering troupe comprises Brookes, O'Keefe, Rossiter, Colin Carrigan, Scott French, Tonya Kearley, and musicians Christina Smith (fiddle) and Gayle Tapper (harp).

During the twelve days of Christmas, they go out once or twice, sometimes visiting as many as ten or a dozen houses in a night (fewer if houses are receptive and hospitable). While some visits are pre-planned, targeting parties to which friends and acquaintances have been invited, the majority of visits are cold calls.

Their modus operandi is to drive around in a van accommodating principal performers and musicians. There may also be room for optional characters, like a Horse Doctor to minister to Old Ball, or a supernumerary mummer who will be called Patsie.

They watch out for party signs--parked cars, footprints in the snow, bright lights. Occasionally entrance is denied, which is philosophically accepted as a rule, although Brookes was outraged when they were turned away from the Government House residence of the Lieutenant Governor--twice.

At less grand dwellings, while they are seldom refused entrance outright, the reception is sometimes chilly--in which case performance is curtailed and mummers hasten to more welcoming venues, perhaps a ladies' card party, a wedding reception (for good luck), a party hosted by a justice of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland, or a dinner in the home of a vociferous former minister of the federal cabinet.

As well as being prepared to subdue feisty ex-cabinet ministers, mummers must remain alert to other potential hazards. Are there children in the audience who might scream--or who might steal the props? Is there a dog in the house that might bark or bite? Is there a cat that will find the harp irresistible? Will you find yourself playing Doctor in a room full of physicians? (If so, you can always enlist one to assist in resuscitating King George.)

And, as the evening progresses, hecklers are liable to be emboldened by alcohol. Once the mummers were heckled in bawdy rhyming couplets.

Despite Father Christmas's threatening club and the menacing clacking of Old Ball's wooden jaws, modern mummering is much more pacific than its forebears, although there is no gainsaying that having a bunch of disguised strangers invade your home is a touch intimidating.

But it also blesses the house. According to Brookes, the mummers play is like a holy vacuum cleaner, sucking up bad feelings and dispelling stuffiness. It closes with a musical benediction.

God bless the master of this house, the mistress also,
And all the little children that round the table go,
The cattle in your stable, the dog by your front door,
And all that dwells within these walls we wish you
ten times more.

While the traditional roles are not always filled by the same mummers, they have their favourites. Brookes favours the Doctor, while Rossiter enjoys being dooropener and presenter in the role of Father Christmas--when he cannot wrest the plum role of the Doctor from the grip of Brookes's exercise of droit de seigneur. O'Keefe professes to like all the parts. He has his admirers in the role of the Turkish Knight, which he pushes to its limits, but he thinks he does not quite understand Old Ball.

Preparing for last year's mummering in the shadow of September 11 provoked debate within the group. With President George W. Bush leading a crusade against Islamic Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, could they retain the Turkish Knight as King George's antagonist? Should they perhaps replace him with a traditional figure from a variant text of the play, like St. Patrick? Oops, that might lead down another bumpy road. Or how about less politically charged figures, like Hercules or Beelzebub?

In the end, they decided to keep the Turkish Knight, and damn the torpedoes. None of their hosts took offence.

They have twice been commissioned to perform the mummers play outside the Christmas season--minus Brookes, who regards summer mummering as sacrilege. It failed miserably. The mummers play is not for tourists, Brookes insists: it is not an entertainment but a ritual with ancient purpose.

So, if it is not Christmas-specific for performers and audience, it is fake--like those quaint Morris Dances performed in South-East England on the well-groomed greens of dormitory villages occupied by brokers and bankers who commute daily into the City.

Whatever else it may be, the Newfoundland mummers play is not quaint. Within traditional boundaries of text and performance, it remains vital and irreverent, embracing improvisation, celebrating continuity and renewal, and responding to changing players, audiences and circumstances over the three decades that the tradition has been sustained by Brookes, O'Keefe, Rossiter and their mummering companions.

When eminent and much-loved folklorist Herbert Halpert passed away, full of years, during the Christmas season of 2000-2001, the mummers visited the wake to pay their respects with a song. Then they proceeded on their unappointed round of festive households, performing again the folk drama that Halpert's life-work had done so much to record and recover in Newfoundland.

Gordon Jones is a freelance theatre critic in St. John's.

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