Chris Brookes, founder of Newfoundland's The Mummers’ Troupe, was known for his commitment to storytelling that was deeply respectful of province's history and cultures.Ruth Lawrence
Whether he was involved in a theatre project with the Mummers Troupe or crafting a radio documentary, Chris Brookes was known for his commitment to vernacular, layered storytelling that was deeply respectful of history and cultures from Newfoundland to Latin America. Internationally recognized for his work, Mr. Brookes won prestigious awards and contributed to the BBC, NPR and Radio Netherlands, as well as the CBC. He died suddenly on April 10 after an accidental fall at the age of 79.
As a theatre artist, Mr. Brookes co-founded the experimental theatre collective the Mummers Troupe in 1972 with Lynn Lunde. A professional company, it put on plays year-round but was first particularly known for its annual December Traditional Mummers Play, which drew on a Newfoundland Christmas tradition. Mummering (sometimes called “janneying” or “fooling”) involved people donning outlandish costumes, visiting neighbours, and performing a dance or recitations while the hosts tried to guess their identity. Not always benign (rum was often a key ingredient), the ritual was declared a public nuisance and banned in 1861, so it ebbed away in many communities until the Mummers Troupe helped to revive it.
The Mummers Troupe kept the traditional structure, involving disguise, Father Christmas and a duel between King George and the Turkish Knight, and revitalized it by adding female actors and incorporating current references and Mr. Brookes’s own research, as well as anecdotes from living memory. They performed in people’s homes, aboard ships in the harbour, even on a city bus.
The Mummers Troupe used theatre for rural community development and incorporated alternative, collective techniques, with a focus on social justice. They used simple props and actors played multiple roles. Its members would often go live in the community whose stories they were collecting, which they placed in scripts verbatim. Among the group’s almost 40 productions were Gros Mourn (1973); Buchans a Company Town (1974); The Bard of Prescott Street, about Newfoundland songster Johnny Burke (1977); and Stars in the Sky Morning, an elegiac two-hander about the lives of women on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula (1978).
“I wanted to make a theatre company that would create shows about social issues, and I wanted it to be oriented toward community development,” Mr. Brookes told Atlantic Insight magazine in 1979. The cultural establishment and many theatregoers “thought we were nutty. Also dangerous.”
That establishment included the Canada Council, then the prime funding agency for Newfoundland theatre (the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council would not be founded until 1980). The council had concerns with collective companies, presuming them less stable than traditional structures. It also questioned the Mummers Troupe’s style of theatre, telling Mr. Brookes in 1973: “As soon as you use real names your theatre becomes political rather than creative.” Things got contentious, and at one point Mr. Brookes refused to accept a grant until the council and the Canadian collective theatres worked out a compromise. Eventually they did reach some common ground.
The Mummers Troupe may be best known for its show They Club Seals, Don’t They? (1978), about the seal hunt. Heralded by a famous poster by Aislin (Terry Mosher), it presented the viewpoint of the sealers and toured nationally as Greenpeace and other animal-rights groups were protesting the seal hunt. The production was one of the most controversial in the country, with long ticket line-ups, protests including one unexpected postshow appearance by Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society, national headlines, and questions asked in Parliament. Sensational atmosphere aside, Mr. Brookes strove to keep the dialogue anchored in fact: The show’s programs were envelopes filled with the hunt’s pros and cons.
“Chris really believed that theatre was the means by which those stories could be told,” Donna Butt, who was part of the Mummers Troupe before founding Rising Tide Theatre, told CBC News.
Mr. Brookes, centre, with members of Campesino Theatre Company. He was internationally recognized for his work, winning a Peabody Award and a Prix Italia.Courtesy of Christina Smith
The Mummers Troupe’s membership fluctuated and at times featured Mary Walsh, of CODCO and This Hour Has 22 Minutes, as well as actor Robert Joy, singer Pamela Morgan, TV personality Jeanne Beker and theatre figure Steven Bush.
Mr. Brookes left the Mummers Troupe in 1980 and the collective disbanded in 1982.
In addition to this tremendous theatrical legacy, Mr. Brookes developed a reputation far beyond his home province for his award-winning work in radio. He began with CBC Radio in 1982, with On the Go in St. John’s, where his innovations included Oil in the Family, a 10-minute soap opera which addressed local news and social issues. In 1984 he became a field producer with Sunday Morning in Toronto, working with the likes of Michael Finlay, Carol Off, and Linden MacIntyre.
“For me the whole soul of the bloody country, and certainly of a public broadcasting institution, is regions, strong regions, that do good, popular, fine programming that gets exposed to people in other regions in the rest of the country and that’s how we know about each other and that’s how we know what Canada is,” he told the St. John’s Sunday Telegram in 1997.
He returned to CBC St. John’s in 1989, built his house in the historic Outer Battery, and worked as a network producer and radio features producer, and helped guide a new generation of broadcasters. His work garnered more than 20 national and international awards.
“He just hears radio so differently from everybody else,” colleague Heather Barrett told the St. John’s Sunday Telegram in 1997.
Mr. Brookes made a radio documentary in 1993 about Newfoundland musicians going to England’s West Country; among them was Christina Smith, a violinist and cellist. The pair fell in love and married in 2000.
After his position at CBC Radio was cut in 1997, he founded Battery Radio, building a studio in the second-storey walk-in closet of his home at the foot of Signal Hill, where Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic wireless signal in 1901. While wearing every imaginable hat, from technician to sound designer to narrator, Mr. Brookes collaborated on a spectrum of projects; a title list would fill pages.
An eight-part CBC Radio series called The Wire: The Impact of Electricity on Music, which Mr. Brookes co-produced with Paolo Pietropaolo, won a prestigious Peabody Award and a Prix Italia in 2005. And the radio feature Cholera Diary, produced by Mr. Brookes, won a Gracie Award in 2000.
“He was one of a kind in his approach to storytelling and his approach to radio and broadcasting,” Newfoundland actor and writer Andy Jones, who collaborated with Mr. Brookes, told CBC News. “He is a major figure in that world in terms of passing on the stories of Newfoundland.”
Mr. Brookes’s work was commissioned by, among others, the BBC, NPR and Radio Netherlands, and broadcast from Finland to Australia. Battery Radio also specialized in place-based fiction installations accessed by phone and sound design, and in 2013 began incorporating GPS and smartphone technology.
“The screen for the radio is your mind,” Mr. Brookes told the St. John’s Sunday Express in 2000. “It’s a very big screen. If it works, to me, it’s like film, or even better than film.”
He was also author of A Public Nuisance: A History of The Mummers Troupe (1988), and a playwright whose credits included Power of the Unemployed (2001), with Kathryn Welbourn.
Christopher Robert Brookes was born in London on Dec. 18, 1943, the only child to Captain Lewis Brookes of the Newfoundland Regiment and Phyliss (née Elmer). Captain Brookes returned home with his war bride and son in 1945, and went on to work as registrar at Memorial University of Newfoundland; Ms. Brookes ran a day care, one of the first in St. John’s.
Chris studied engineering at MUN, and then finished that degree at the Nova Scotia Technical College in 1965 (and retained a lifelong dexterity for gadgetry). He earned a master’s in theatre at the University of Michigan in 1969, was briefly artist-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, worked a season in Toronto with Inner City Puppets, and toured Newfoundland and Labrador communities with MUN Extension Service, performing Punch and Judy shows.
After leaving the Mummers Troupe he received an International Development Research Centre grant and worked in Latin America as a theatre artist with Nicaragua’s Teocoyani Theatre Company and amateur campesino drama groups, and as a journalist on radio documentaries there and in El Salvador.
He was a juror for several international prizes and festivals and served on the boards of Artistic Fraud theatre company, the St. John’s International Storytelling Festival, and publisher Running the Goat Books and Broadsides. He was inducted into the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Hall of Honour in 1997 and received an honorary degree from MUN in 2007. He was named to the Order of Canada in 2000.
Mr. Brookes leaves his wife, Ms. Smith.