MARK BLAGRAVE
The publication of scripts of five shows by CODCO dating from the 1970s is cause for much joy. With the cooperation of members of the troupe, Helen Peters has made available and accessible the constellations of sketches that called themselves, respectively: Cod on a Stick; Sickness, Death and Beyond the Grave; Would You Like to Smell My ... Pocket Crumbs?; and The Tale Ends. All have been worked into a format that is easy and pleasing to read, allowing the pieces to evoke (and sometimes provoke) from the reader everything from the chuckles to the guffaws that greeted their original presentations. Line numbers in margins and listings of sketches at the beginning of each section of the book allow for quick reference. There is a glossary with fifty-eight entries ranging from explanations of specifically Newfoundland terms to a twelve-word definition of the New Democratic Party. Stage directions (provided largely by Andy Jones), vocal lines for the songs, and a wealth of photographs from the productions all help complete the picture.
The volume appears to go beyond an intention purely to document what was done to anticipate the possibility of new production of these scripts by other companies when it makes such allowances as this: "in this scene and in others where original actors' names are used, actors may substitute their own names" (p. 89). The stage directions, however, frequently wrestle with the tension between, on the one hand, producing a text that can give life beyond the original performance and company of players and, on the other, an exact reconstruction of the original. The description of the setting for Das Capital, for instance, is prescriptive right down to the dimensions and configurations of flats. A similar tension is felt in Peters' decision to include material such as "Morton the Dying Child Molester," because it has a place in the original 'seventies Would You Like to Smell My ... Pocket Crumbs?, at the same time as she apologizes at length for its potential to offend in the 'nineties.
We are told in the "Note on the Text" (xxxviii) that the volume was originally conceived as a means of testing some principles of textual editing, and Helen Peters carefully articulates what principles these might be and outlines the decisions she has made. The book's jacket asserts that Peters'"rigorous editorial method provides a much-needed model..." overall decision to follow methods originally devised for dealing with variant printed texts, however, may not be completely above question. One is inclined to wonder whether the editing of previously unpublished work, with the active cooperation of its authors, is really an act of secondary edition or whether it is in fact closer to the role of a primary editor of a first edition. Might the "variants" that Peters so carefully lists in her textual apparatus not be analogous to "drafts" tried and rejected in arriving at a first edition? The importance of documenting variants is obvious in cases where multiple edi tions and the passage of time have rendered an author's intentions unclear or in doubt, or when successive generations have arrived at various inter pretations of a work as a result of variations in the respective printed texts available to them. Neither applies here. While there is, no doubt, much of a critical nature that might, and should, be made of variations in successive performances of CODCO's work, any researcher, in order to ground such a study, would presumably wish to return to the primary manuscript and taped material itself.
Peters' general "Introduction" provides a brief, often anecdotal, history of the company and a series of enthusiastic summaries of the plays. Since these latter are printed in their entirety in the volume, the need for the summaries is not clear. Neither is it clear why a reference to Bakhtin's work on Rabelais is included at the conclusion of the "Introduction," since what is said here has not been used in any way to govern the essay. The notes to the "Introduction," in their reliance on general reference works and secondary sources for citation, and with their unsubstantiated denial of statements made in other works, suggest the need for a more substantial essay to accompany the primary texts. The level of proof-reading, especially in a work the objective of which is careful editing practices, could use a second look too.
Reservations about some aspects of the volume's apparatus notwithstanding, I believe the publication of The Plays of CODCO to be a valuable project and one that marks an important contribution to our understanding of this country's theatre.