By Nicola Ryan
Scene 1
A living room in St. John’s. Early 1990s. Evening, family gathered around the TV. PARENTS howl with laughter at ANDY JONES as FATHER DINN on CBC.
Andy Jones has been a professional writer and actor for over forty years. He’s well known as one of the members of the groundbreaking comedy troupe Codco and has written five critically acclaimed one-man shows. His new book from Breakwater, Actor Needs Restraint! features comedy sketches from his iconic repertoire, highlighting the important role he’s been playing in Newfoundland’s creative scene over the years.
“Breakwater asked me to pick three one-man shows for a first volume,” Andy explains over the phone from his home in downtown St. John’s. “So I went back to the very first one I did in 1983, which was called Out of the Bin, and then I went to the latest one I did, which was An Evening with Uncle Val in 2006. And then we did King o’ Fun which was, gosh, I can’t remember now the exact year.” [1997]
Making sense of Andy’s extensive history/ragtag collection of monologues, comedy bits and one-man sketches and turning them into a readable collection was no small feat.
“It took a long time. I worked with my director and dramaturge, Charlie Tomlinson, for months actually, off and on, to get all the instructions and stage directions right in terms of what’s going on. It took a long time to do that because we wanted the book to be readable to a person who just picks it up. Lois Brown directed An Evening with Uncle Val and I also worked with her and found all her notes and her prompt book from the show and so on and used that to reconstruct things just in case somebody ever wanted to do it.”
Scene 2
Same living room. Late 1990s. Late Saturday night. My BROTHER and I watch Codco reruns practically on mute, shaking with silent mirth. ANDY JONES as FRANK ARSENPUFFIN makes us laugh so hard we nearly fall out of our chairs.
Andy credits his love of comedy and sketch humour to a “misspent youth” in St. John’s listening to The Goon Show on radio.
“We started off in sketch comedy, we fell into that form, that was our kind of world,” he explains, referencing the other members of Codco. “We listened to the British comedians on the radio when we were kids. There was a great review that was done in the 60s, it was called Beyond the Fringe. You ever hear of those guys? It was Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and [Jonathan Miller] and I know myself and Greg and most people in our generation knew that album. I could do half the sketches for you just off the top of my head! And so that was a big influence.
“Also, in Codco half our parents were baymen and half our parents were townies so we had lots and lots and lots of stories,” Andy adds with a laugh. “So many stories. And that just leaked into everything we did. We were really, really proud of Newfoundland and really wanted to get that message out, you know, how interesting we are and how interesting our language is and our wit and our storytelling and our music.”
In April of 1976, Sandra Gwyn wrote a piece in Saturday Night that dubbed the revival of art and theatre in Newfoundland during the 1960s and 70s, as a renaissance. It was a heady time to be young and creative in Newfoundland when the Codco gang was getting started.
“In a way, we had an advantage and a disadvantage,” Andy recalls. “The disadvantage was that there was no infrastructure at all, or very little. And the advantage was that, you know, no one was telling us what to do, so we made it up ourselves. We made it all up! We figured out how to do it. I mean, we were obviously part of a movement all over North America which was doing your own material and stuff like that, not depending on American and British scripts. But, like I say, we just made it up as we went along and did everything the way we wanted to. It was a very creative time.
“Newfoundland didn’t even ever have the model the rest of Canada had,” he explains. “Halifax had Neptune Theatre, Edmonton had the Citadel Theatre, Vancouver had Vancouver Playhouse or whatever, and so they all had all these superimposed sort of British or American models in their community. Whereas in Newfoundland we didn’t have that. The Arts and Culture Centres existed but there were no companies built along those lines. So it started off with Codco and the Mummers Troupe, Shelia’s Brush, and of course then all the musical groups like Figgy Duff, so it evolved on its own. I mean obviously we had all read plays and we weren’t making up the art form, but we were doing it our own way and we were doing it about ourselves.
“It was also a very tender political time in Newfoundland too because we were the first generation of Canadians,” he continues. “We had great opportunities like to go to university and stuff like that that we never had before, but there was also a lot of questioning about Confederation at that time because we felt that we weren’t doing that well and also we were kind of like the joke people of Canada. It’s hard for your generation to understand but people really, gee whiz, they just thought you were ridiculous if you were a Newfoundlander – it was crazy. And so we had that mission to accomplish, to change that.”
An important part of what Andy and his one-man shows have done over the years is to give to younger theatre makers inspiring evidence that you can make a life doing theatre here. Actor Needs Restraint! is a celebration of Andy, of humour and of the rich cultural landscape of Newfoundland – and this is only Volume 1.
Scene 3
Downhome office. Present day. Morning. Wrapping up the phone interview for this story, I quip a quote from Codco. ANDY JONES laughs.
End.
