Robert L. McDougall
This little book, though rather unattractively produced, is an important instrument for scholars. I am not sure how many will want to enter the area it opens up, for it is a very special one. Dates considered, Canadian National Theatre on the Air began in the 1920s with the advent of radio as a powerful means of mass communication, and it ended with radio's abdication of its position of preeminence to television in the 1950s. Substance considered, its mark is the evolution of an art form, drama designed for listening, so submissively tied to its medium that when the power of that medium waned the art form died in the vine. Since its residual life was committed to scripts very seldom published, the golden age of radio drama in Canada left only secret and fugitive records of its palmy days. The result has been a kind of black hole in the cultural history of the country.
Professor Fink and the Radio Drama Project at Concordia University now promise visibility, and the immediate impression one has is of the surprising extent and richness of the landscape which comes into view. Between 1925 and 1961, close to 8000 radio dramas (including episodes of serials) were broadcast by Canadian radio stations. Of this total, and not counting repeat broadcasts, 3700 were original Canadian plays. The project's first task was to collect scripts from every possible source. These scripts were then deposited in the Broadcasting Archives at Concordia, and to them were added copies of scripts from a handful of existing repositories for radio drama, notably those at McMaster University and the University of Calgary. Moving parallel to this was a sweep for secondary sources: schedules, logs, indexes, program listings, and the like. Computer programming took over the transition to bibliography. Since raw data yielded over 25,000 entries, the bibliography was put on microfiche cards, hence the reader will find twenty of these tucked into the end-jacket of the book. The book, so to speak, is therefore in the jacket, and so, as many others will have to do with some inconvenience, I have had to take these little bits of plastic to a scanner in the library to see how they work. They work very well, if you have an author, you can get a play; if you have a play, you can get an author. If you have a director, you can get the plays he directed; if you have a serial, you can get the plays which were its parts. Most important, in almost every case you can get the location of the original script, Concordia in eight cases out of ten, of course, but elsewhere as well, and in a number of cases where the source is unique, the location of a broadcast recording. For many entries, moreover, there is a brief synopsis of the script.
I have implied that not many are likely to seek entry into this apparently arcane area of research. I hope I am wrong. The golden age of radio drama carried a substantial share of the burden (and it was a burden in those days) in the development of literary and artistic talent in Canada for almost three decades. It provided a training ground for actors, producers, directors, and technicians who would later show their mettle at the Crest Theatre, at Stratford, at the Shaw Festival, and indeed throughout Canada. As for the writers: the sad part of the story is that for many of them the best of their work lived and died in the moment of broadcast. Within the bibliography as a whole, there are 251 entries for Len Peterson, 183 for Lister Sinclair, 180 for Joseph Schull, and 100 for Andrew Allan. Ever heard of them? Maybe. There is some superb work here, and I know this because I was once privileged to hear or read a good part of it. Perhaps the most powerful of the scripts were those which reflected strongly the social conscience of the times, as the temper of the times demanded. I would say (and I guess I am thinking primarily of the nearly fifteen years of the Stage series produced from Toronto under the direction of Andrew Allan and Esse W. Ljungh) that in the field of radio drama we were quite simply the best in the world during the forties and fifties of this century. And I cannot emphasize too much that at its best this work was finely crafted for listening. Radio's apparent limitation was its strength. The sound of the human voice became all important, as it had been under different circumstances for the Elizabethan dramatists; the bugaboo of the visual was set aside, and the imagination, suitably cued, and of course endlessly fertile and flexible in its resources, set the scenes as needed.
An oversight? Why is Lucio Agostini not mentioned in the introduction to this little book, where we are given a brief account of the genesis and development of the golden age? For it was Lucio Agostini, in his long connection with the Stage series, who conceived, scored and produced the music that became an integral part of the intentions of the writers and directors for whom he worked.
Go students, young or old, to this little book and its bulging jacket. The way is open now for the study of a long neglected chapter in the history of the arts in Canada.