Malcolm Page
Radio drama sometimes seems to have survived on C.B.C. almost by accident, by its very unobtrusiveness. Television supplanted radio drama in the United States; perhaps a few people who cared about its distinctive possibilities as an art form kept it alive at C.B.C. In the early eighties Susan Rubes drastically re-shaped programming, increasing the number of serialized novels and introducing Morningside serials and docudrama series such as Disasters and The Scales of Justice. Yet radio drama goes virtually unreviewed and unpublished.1
In January-February 1986 Sextet was transmitted on Sunday Matinee, descended from C.B.C. Stage (established in 1944) and still the flagship of drama. The six 55-minute plays by women were all produced by John Juliani, whose work is often characterized by ingenious layered use of sound. The writers earned $3,800 each for their work. Three of the women have a high reputation as playwrights (Carol Bolt, Margaret Hollingsworth and Beverley Rosen - formerly Simons); Audrey Thomas for fiction; Anne Cameron and the youngest, Barbara Sapergia, had both previously written for radio, television, the stage, and verse and fiction.
Cameron's From the Belly of the Old Woman begins with a battered wife entering a Transition House with her 11-year-old son. Strange Indian chanting is heard in the background, so we know that this will not be narrowly a social problem piece by an angry feminist. During her first night in the House, the mother thinks back over childhood experiences and tells stories to her wakeful child. When she was 11, one Summer she met Klopinum, a wise old Indian woman, 'looking as if she had grown from the ground itself.' 'The rainbow,' she says, 'is the bridge between earth and sky.' Sententiousness looms, yet the Old Woman's tales of Frog Woman creating the world and of the matriarch Dzelarhons hold us, as they hold the little girl - and she re-tells them to her son. Story-telling and preserving the past are important. Indian and white, past and present, myth and reality are skilfully woven together. The young wife finally gains strength and anger from the example of Klopinum and what she said, and at the end she has an identity and a future. Cameron unites her passion about present oppression of women and commitment to Indian tradition with greater success than in previous works such as Dreamspeaker.
Carol Bolt's Unconscious takes up the challenge of writing dialogue for males. Peter, the father, talks directly to the listener about his problems with Jack, his 13-year-old son, repeating 'My son wants to kill me,' as he has found a gun in his boy's room. The father's lines come in fragments, mixed with talk to his son, who spends his time on Yonge Street with older teenagers and knows too much about drink, dope and homosexuality. The son is heard with his friends, and the story can be pieced together: father and son are not reconciled when they go to a rural cottage; the father stops sending the son to a psychiatrist. Predictably, the gun goes off and Jack at the end is 'unconscious.' Rachel Wyatt, in brief comments on the plays in Books in Canada in April 1986, commented glibly that 'this play should be required listening for parents everywhere, reducing it to the kind of hackneyed problem play which Bolt so imaginatively avoids providing. Bolt described her play in Radio Guide (all six writers introduced their work in the January 1986 issue). Yet this suggests that she thinks she has written a different play. Not only does she see 'black humour': 'I've been reading a lot of Freudian psychology. It's fascinating stuff, but it also makes me very angry - especially Freud's approach to women ... . The more I read, the more I came to realize that the classic, primal theme in Freud is the oedipal conflict - the desire to kill your parents. I wanted to see what would happen with that kind of dynamic if I applied it to my own characters... . Unconscious is a very stylized piece. It's not realistic.' These comments indicate a more original and unusual play than the one I heard.
Barbara Sapergia's Roundup was the most straightforward play: its rural setting is familiar in such dramas as Bolt's Shelter, Ted Galay's plays and Joanna Glass's Canadian Gothic. Sapergia explains in Radio Guide: 'I have a real feeling for people living in the country and for the special kind of community that exists there.' She writes specifically of the south Saskatchewan she knows. In Roundup several women prepare pickles and cabbage rolls while the men work at branding and castrating. The women talk of the past, when 'life was less complicated.' They chatter about bolting horses, the doctor on his Shetland pony, co-operation when a barn burned, and also of a man crippled at a roundup and of sick babies dying because of winter isolation. When they discuss the present, the drought means that 'farming doesn't work any more... . Banks can take away all our land and no-one will even notice.' The past/present contrast is seen also between mother and daughter. Verna, apparently the conventional farm wife, wants her daughter Darcy to go to university. Darcy, however, wants to join the men in their roundup work and to stay home and marry. So who is really opposing traditional roles? Daughter will get her way by becoming. pregnant, and we end cosily (ironically?) with everyone eating together and the line, 'Here's to good company.'
The scripts by Bolt and Sapergia resembled C.B.C. television's examination of social problems in For the Record, as did Margaret Hollingsworth's Woman on the Wire. In this Kate, a Canadian wife and mother, is drawn to the peace camp at the Cruise missile base at Greenham Common, England. Hollingsworth creates the tension of night beside the barbed-wire fence, with lonely male sentry on one side and one female look-out on the other. Both are tired, jumpy and afraid. In snippets, we learn how Kate had to accompany her manager husband from Calgary to London and how an English friend first takes her to Greenham Common, then how the commitment becomes more vital for Kate than her marriage. Another camper is a teacher who found she could teach war because it was History, but not Peace, because it was politics. Hollingsworth slips in information, that the Cruise has 15 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb and occupies mobile launchers; that men, unwelcome at Greenham Common, should camp at the other 102 American bases in Britain. She slips in a few polemics, too; Kate proclaims: 'just being here can make a difference to life on this planet.' Though the message is clear, Women on the Wire is also structured well to fill in gradually Kate's journey to understanding what matters most to her, and is effective artistically, as when song, husband's 'I love you' and the trial judge asking 'How do you plead?' are intercut and overlapped.
Beverley Rosen's Hunting the Lion was the most demanding work, despite her disarming introduction in Radio Guide: 'In this play the world of my imagination and the events of my everyday life have come together more closely than ever before.' Ann Parrish, aged 40, is travelling by train from Vancouver to the Rockies, escaping for a week from husband and two teenagers, to be alone. She looks back at her life and records ideas for stories and maxims in her notebook: 'Would I be a different person if I re-wrote Anne Parrish's journals?' 'You start with what you see; writing it down changes it.' On the train the steward brings her messages from her husband, an oily man pursues her, and her saluki, caged in the baggage-car, howls. The saluki, Anne informs us, is a breed that has not changed in more than 3,000 years; the name means 'eyes of God.' The saluki represents power and Anne half-realizes she needs to identify with this. Lions, too: a man's eyes flecked like a lion, and on the train an over-age hippie whose hair streams out behind him like a lion's mane. Some of this is 'real' and some, more private, in Anne's head. In the Rockies Anne is going to find some peace, be nearer self-knowledge and decisions about her life than she was in the city. Rosen's puzzles are intriguing ones, and this play, like Cameron's, rewards at a second hearing.
On the Immediate Level of Events Occurring in Meadows, by Audrey Thomas, has a simple surface narrative. Helen, a divorced author with a young daughter living on a Gulf Island in British Columbia, has an affair with a professor, a naturalist studying hummingbirds. This is a guarded mid-thirties friendship, with the child observing her mother's new romance. Writer and naturalist are compared: both keep 'field notes,' both ask 'why?,' but the writer claims superiority because she never hurts. The theme of animals' rights is raised, probably science and humanity in conflict. Thomas expresses the issue clearly in Radio Guide: 'What does the good man do - the man of integrity - when he believes breakthroughs in medical research depend on the use of animals, yet he recoils in horror at the cavalier attitude of the scientific profession?' Finally, as the researcher and his students come to trap birds near her, she turns and runs from him. Tentative, meditative, Thomas's play is rich with humanity and with important moral questions.
On the Immediate Level starts from the short story, 'Elevation,' published in her Goodbye, Harold, Good Luck (1986). When elaborated and developed, Sapergia's play could easily be for the stage, as it is set in a kitchen in virtually continuous time. The other four aspire to the special condition of 'pure radio,' fragmented ('scrappy' if the critic dislikes the technique), moving freely in time and space, in and out of minds, the spoken word and the unspoken thought mingling, music and sounds floating in.
As for performances, I find familiar voices stay in my memory, particularly Susan Williamson's old woman in Hollingsworth's play. Anna Hagan impressed me as Anne in Hunting the Lion; my award goes to Rae Brown for the weight and dignity she gave to Klopinum in Cameron's drama.
Geographically, the prairie setting is vital for Sapergia's characters and Greenham Common is identified precisely by Hollingsworth. Cameron and Thomas use West Coast geography, climate and way of life. Bolt's location might be any big city; the main point for Rosen is the journey.
Four of these dramas are about women. Rosen takes us within one troubled woman; Sapergia shows mother and daughter; Cameron has her white in the present and her Indian in memory; Hollingsworth skilfully presents both Kate's story and female solidarity at the gate at Greenham Common. Thomas's woman shares the time with her male admirer, yet at the end the woman is presented as correct about both animals' rights and the man. Bolt - audaciously if perversely - shows males and their male-created problems.
These plays are rich; on this sample the
radio form is not merely alive but healthy.
Note
1 On Canadian radio drama, see Canadian
Theatre Review, No 36, Fall 1982; Canadian Drama 9. 1, 1983;
HOWARD FINK 'The Sponsor's v. the Nation's Choice: North American Radio
Drama' Radio Drama ed. Peter Lewis (London, 1981) pp 185-243; HOWARD
FINK, 'A National Radio Drama in English,' Contemporary Canadian Theatre:
New World Visions ed. Anton Wagner (Toronto, 1985) pp 176-85; MALCOLM
PAGE, 'Canadian Radio Drama,' Radio Literature Conference, 1977: Conference
Papers 1, ed. Peter Lewis (Durham University, England, 1978) pp 99-120.
Recent published scripts are EARLE BIRNEY Words on Waves: Selected Radio
Plays (Quarry/CBC, 1985) [his scripts 1946-57], The Scales of Justice
2 vols, ed. George Jones (Lester and Orpen Dennys / CBC 1986) [with 7
and 10 scripts] and ERIKA RITTER, 'Miranda,' Canadian Theatre Review
No 47, Summer 1986) pp 73-120 (broadcast on Cranks,' 10 Nov. 1985).
I am grateful to John Juliani and Don Kowalchuk for their conversation
and practical assistance in hearing tapes of the plays in a C.B.C. studio.
Return to article