Helen Peters, driving force in N.L.’s arts community, dead at 83
Peters edited The Plays of Codco, served on community boards
Helen Peters, a driving force in Newfoundland and Labrador’s artistic landscape, has died.
She was deeply involved in supporting and developing the province’s culture, serving as a member of the board of the magazine Newfoundland Quarterly, editing The Plays of Codco, and sitting on the boards of a number of community groups.
She died on Jan. 8 at 83 years old.
Theatre producer and filmmaker Ruth Lawrence, whose friendship with Peters stretches back over three decades, said her death is being felt by many people.
Lawrence said Peters, a longtime university professor with Memorial University's faculty of English, helped her develop a critical eye for her own work and to think about the creative decisions she made.
“She really filled that critical analysis need that I had to talk about … and my own work as well, but also the work of others. So we got to know each other in every single way,” Lawrence told CBC Radio’s The St. John’s Morning Show on Wednesday.
She said Peters was also a music lover, would watch local stand-up comedy, buy art and go to show openings. She said Peters and her husband, Henry Tremblay, were “true patrons.”
“It's really nice to me now to have so many people talking about her, because really [that] keeps her alive for me," said Lawrence.
Codco alumnus, writer, comedian and actor Andy Jones said Peters was a “great force in the community.”
Jones worked with Peters when she was gathering Codco’s performances for a collection, which he said was an incredible experience.
“She's such a scholar, such a brilliant scholar, which is something I have never been in my life,” he said with a laugh.
“Everything that we did, all the sketches that we did in those early years on stage, are all there.”
Both Lawrence and Jones said The Plays of Codco has had an enduring legacy, especially for young performers in the province.
Jones said actors who were once up and coming, like Mark Critch, Dave Sullivan and Philip Goodridge, were able to perform Codco sketches because of Peters.
“Lots of other young actors, as they were coming up, did … The Plays of Codco, along the way all because of Helen,” he said.
Peters’s obituary said she worked as a medical laboratory technologist in the 1960s before getting degrees in English from Memorial University. She then headed to Oxford University for her doctoral studies, where her thesis, as a book, won the coveted British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 1981.
Peters went on to teach at the University of Ottawa and then Memorial University, retiring in 2004.
A celebration of life for Peters is scheduled for Feb. 28th at 2 p.m. NT at the Elks Club in St. John's.
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With files from The St. John’s Morning Show