By Adam Carter
Cast into the Atlantic Ocean on Canada’s eastern side, the island of Newfoundland is known for many things: a rugged, worn coastline, battered by high winds and pervasive fog. Salt-strewn streets and even saltier food, coupled with a dialect that is both parts lively and borderline indecipherable. A rich and varied history filled with hardships, entertainers, struggles and storytellers.
The Newfoundland Coastline - courtesy Sandra Elford
St. John’s, the capital, is not a burgeoning metropolitan centre. Though it has a thriving arts community and a plethora of rural live theatre, Newfoundland is much more at ease with being called quaint than it is hip. This is not to discount the depth and scope of the Newfoundland arts community: this little island has produced some of the best art this country has ever seen.
But hip, it isn’t.
That all changed in 2009, when Republic of Doyle started filming for CBC. Suddenly, the arts world exploded. Jobs opened for actors, production staff, culinary services – the world was immediately their oyster. Downtown St. John’s was transformed seemingly overnight into a hubbub of camera crews, lighting trucks, and cordoned off streets. This little town now boasted a hit television series, and its winding streets were jammed full with Canadian stars, film crews, and more people that could stake their claim as a film extra than Newfoundland had ever seen.
With a production this monumental must come change, but how has the arts community shifted? Has Doyle irrevocably transformed the scene in Newfoundland and if so, how?
Doyle’s executive producer John Vatcher lives in Newfoundland, and with his wife Debbie, has raised two kids on the island. His love for Newfoundland is palpable when he speaks, and it quickly becomes evident that he sees the island as an intrinsic part of the show.
“I think that the land actually shapes you, and learning to be a musician or an entertainer is something that you take on here, it’s not given. We have a sense of what is important, what is not, and what we love,” he says.
“If we’re gonna go listen to music, well why not just go play music? If we’re gonna go watch a play, well then why not just act? We love to entertain ourselves, we don’t wait for anyone else to do it.”
He mentions Canadian actors that have called Newfoundland their home, and the names quickly start to pile up: Rick Mercer, Mark Critch, Allan Doyle, Shaun Majumder, Mary Walsh, Gordon Pinsent, the list goes on. “These people become well received in Canadiana because they’re funny, vibrant, and very talented,” he says.
He’s quick to point out while Republic of Doyle has in fact altered the arts community, it has done so in tandem with hordes of talented Newfoundlanders who are getting the chance to showcase their craft. “With Doyle being here we need craftspeople, we need the lighting business, we’ve actually trained piles of people in the last two years as to how to be a background artist,” he says.
“We can expose actors that might otherwise have had to go to Toronto, we can use them as Newfoundlanders and add that flavour to the show, and we can showcase it.” There’s a kind of almost nationalistic pride that comes in using born and bred Newfoundlanders as much as possible, and it speaks to the ideals and sense of togetherness that has been created.
Vatcher believes the arts community as a whole will only get better as Doyle continues. He sees actors getting better as they audition more, and local musicians finding a place on television for their voices. Vatcher and company have already catalogued the songs of hundreds of local musicians for use on the show.
“[Doyle] has everybody bring their ‘A’ game – we get the benefit of that and they get the benefit of us. It’s a true collaboration. I don’t think we could tell the story in any other city, and we’re very happy that the arts community are our best partners.”
That contagious excitement that resonates throughout Newfoundland doesn’t begin and end with the producers. Krystin Pellerin plays Constable Leslie Bennett on set, and she can attest to the lift now found on these shores. “There’s just been this infusion, and everyone has come together suddenly. The whole arts community is coming together in a huge way,” she says. “There’s a great feeling going around, a wonderful energy.”
Allan Hawco on the set of Republic of Doyle - Photo by Ian Vatcher, courtesy Republic of Doyle
Pellerin started acting at the age of 14 with the Shakespeare by the Sea theatre company, performing the Bard’s work on the jagged cliffs of Logy Bay and Cape Spear. She then found herself working with the Beothuk Street Players and MUN Drama, before heading to the mainland for school and work. It was her role in Republic of Doyle that brought her back to the province she loves. “The spirit and the strength of the community has always been here and thrived, and now Doyle has really raised the bar,” she says.
She concedes that one of the biggest things hurting Newfoundland’s arts community presently is funding. “I remember seeing some of the best plays I’ve ever seen here – it’s a very thriving community without the funding behind it, so people would do it just because it needed to be done.”
Having lived here and knowing the community well, Pellerin knows how difficult it is to make a living as an artist in Newfoundland. “You come across a lot of people who are extremely talented at a lot of different things because they have to be, which is pretty unique to St. John’s because of the amount of funding available,” she says. Many people are forced to become a kind of jack of all trades to simply make ends meet.
Now, with Doyle into its second season and looking at a third, the cash influx has helped enable creators to do what they really want: create. “It’s boosted morale for the arts scene big time,” she says. “On lunch breaks people are all talking about the short films they’re making, and their side projects.”
That sentiment is echoed by Melanie O’Brien, who had a short role on Doyle in its first season. O’Brien is a working entertainer in St. John’s, making a living day to day as a musician and actress. She firmly believes the show has radically altered the way the arts community is now running. From one day of work on set with a speaking role, she did so well with pay and an extra ACTRA credit that she didn’t have to search for a nine-to-five summer job as she usually does, which allowed her more time to focus on acting and music – her real passions.
“What Doyle is doing is cutting out the joe-job,” she says. “It’s giving artists more time to focus on their craft and what they really want to do, therefore they’re getting more done, therefore there’s more music being released here, there’s more plays happening here, it’s just really enriching the whole scene.”O’Brien says every time she watches Doyle she sees familiar faces from the local arts community. “When I see them, I know that it was a great boost and a great lift for them. Not just for confidence, but financially as well.”
Not only that, O’Brien says the cast and crew are just really fun to work with. Cast dinners and hockey games help foster a sense of community. “It’s one of the nicest casts I’ve ever seen,” she says. “They fed me a lot … I feel like a princess every time I’m on set. Someone’s always knocking on your door and saying ‘Are you hungry, can I get you anything?’ and maybe some actresses don’t take them up on it – but I’m an actress who eats.”
Philip Goodridge, another St. John’s-based actor who had a part on season one of Doyle, knows that his artistic community has always been strong, but says the show is still a boost for the province overall. “The exterior shots are excellent, because in every movie or television show that I’ve seen about Newfoundland, everything looks so damn foggy and bleak and miserable.” He laughs, adding “at least on Doyle there’s a bit of bloody sunshine, you know?”
“There’s a lot of consistent work on the production side, which is awesome to have. And it’s great for those who have lead roles,” he says.
He believes dedication on all fronts is key. “Everyone that I work with that has auditioned for the show and that has gotten on the show, we try really hard and we make a good effort here. People kill themselves in this town even doing volunteer stuff.” That in itself is the crux of the problem that lies within Newfoundland and the way Doyle is changing it. There are so few venues in which the creators can create, and yet still be paid for it. Doyle is enabling steady work and stability, something performers deserve just as much as any other profession.
Rick Boland has been on both stage and screen in Newfoundland for over four decades, and he knows this all too well. “It’s a very difficult life when you’re self-employed,” he says. “I’ve been at it for 40 years but I have no pension. I don’t have the security of a future that I can retire into.”
Boland’s massive body of work includes CBC’s Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, as well as Newfoundland theatre stalwart Revue, which still sells out houses all over the province after 25 years. Even so, he is far from rolling in revenue generated through acting. “We often sell ourselves short because we want to do the project anyway. You think ‘I love this, so I’ll do it for next to nothing’,” Boland says. “This is not a field that you get into unless you can’t do anything else. I don’t mean that you’re not capable of doing anything else, but that nothing else makes you happy.”
Photo by Ian Vatcher, Courtesy Republic of Doyle
Boland knows Doyle is doing plenty for the Newfoundland arts community, but cautions this is a case of “be careful what you wish for.” There’s a vortex brewing in Newfoundland when it comes to crew, and it’s culminating because of the show. “Crew are all used for Doyle, so other producers just can’t produce anything because they have none,” he says.
Ironically, Newfoundland’s producers would have to bring in their crew from elsewhere, which means hotel bills on top of salary, making the entire venture more expensive. “The fact that the crew that we’ve built here is now doing Doyle is great. It’s fabulous to have a national television show that’s going into its third season out of St. John’s…But we now need to build a new crew.” This isn’t Montreal or Toronto – this city really only has one production crew, essentially.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Boland says cautiously, “For the 10 or 12 regulars on the show it’s utterly fantastic, it’s out of this world. I know people who have bought and paid for houses off of Republic of Doyle, and that’s wonderful – we need more of it. But the thing on everybody’s minds is – if you have your whole crew working on one production, then you pretty soon stagnate. If you don’t start building a second crew so that you’re growing, then, God forbid…” he says, trailing off.
An arts community is only as good as the innovation behind it. Every artist deserves some stability, but comfort is precarious – to rely on a single lucrative production sets the art scene up to fester in mediocrity around that one gem. What happens when it’s gone?
Common sense would then seem to dictate there is an easy fix here: simply hire more crew. More work for everyone should be a great thing, and in some ways, it is. Though the construction of secondary crew has started, it still can be difficult. “When you have to build a crew, that costs money,” Boland says. “You’re talking about training, so you’re talking about doubling up in some instances. In your camera department, instead of an efficient unit, you have a bunch of people who are apprenticing.” Without the proper guidance, who is there to ensure the quality that’s needed for this next generation?
All his technical worries and woes aside, Boland does equate Republic of Doyle with that certain kind of nationalism a place like Newfoundland breeds. “It’s very difficult for artists in Ontario to create things about Ontario,” he says. “Because Ontario doesn’t give a good god damn about itself. It doesn’t have that, so it’s harder to sell. And because they aren’t an island, they’re part of the stream – so they think it’s much more important to emulate an American tradition. Whereas here, it’s very important to us that we celebrate our difference, and in many ways Doyle does that.”
“As much as it is Rockford Files, and as much as it’s American formulaic detective drama, it’s also unmistakeably Newfoundland. Jake Doyle is the son of Gordon Pinsent’s rowdy man – that character is a part of us.”
