Mary Jane Miller
From the mid-1950s to 1970 television drama served as Canada's national theatre. Television drama trained actors (such as Drainie, Hyland, Hutt, Henry, Reid, Rain and Campbell), writers (such as Ryga, French, Dubé, Remillard) and directors (such as McGowan, Gardner, Till, Duke, Prizek, Hart) who prepared audiences, recorded performances and produced a body of work which forms a distinctive, dramatic oeuvre of high quality.
De 1951 à 1970, le drame pour la télévision était le théâtre national du Canada. Le drame pour la télévision a formé des acteurs (tels que Drainie, Hyland, Hutt, Henry, Reid, Rain et Campbell), des auteurs (tels que Ryga, French, Dubé, Remillard), et des directeurs (tels que McGowan, Gardner, Till, Duke, Prizek, Hart) qui ont préparé le grand public, qui ont filmé les représentations, et qui ont présenté des oeuvres d'excellente qualité.
Until very recently, it has been difficult to evaluate the contribution of drama written for or presented on television to the development of Canadian theatre. The scripts were in cardboard boxes in the basement of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the kinescopes uncatalogued and inaccessible, the tapes and films of later programmes not available for viewing and the CBC records and files fragmentary or nonexistent. Some of that has changed, thanks in part to the pressure of the daughter of the ACTH, the Association for the Study of Canadian Radio and Television. Qualified scholars can now request access to cassettes of early CBC plays from the National Film, Television and Sound Division of the Public Archives of Canada.1 Access to material taped or filmed in the seventies is still problematical and none of us can, as yet, officially show dramas in our classrooms. But that could change in time, if enough of us see the relevance of the study of this material to general studies of Canadian drama, theatre history and communications, and to contemporary and classic dramatic literature. This article is an attempt to demonstrate the value of this material and to encourage further studies in a long-neglected area of research.
Within the scope of this article, it is impossible to verify qualitative assertions with analysis, but it is possible to document some of the ways in which television drama has fostered the quickening growth of Canadian theatre.2 Perhaps modern Canadian drama can be said to have been seeded in the twenties and thirties, cultivated in the late forties, fifties and early sixties, to have flowered in the 1970s and perhaps come to fruition in the 1980s. In that pattern of growth and maturation television drama has played a crucial part.
The nomenclature of television is very muddled, with usage varying from country to country, network to network, even producer to producer. 'Drama' usually connotes plays for the theatre; therefore, the term 'television drama' should be self-contradictory. There are even those who have said that the use of the word 'drama' attributes to television a seriousness which it does not deserve. The BBC often uses the word 'teleplay'. 'Film drama' or simply 'film' is used by contemporary CBC producers who work with film rather than tape. Half-hour 'tape dramas' like situation comedies add to the confusion. In the United States, new terms like 'mini-movies' have appeared, although the favourite term of the middle management executives at ABC, NBC, and CBS for fictional scripts is the very revealing 'product'. The fact is that, as technology moved from 'live to air', to 'live to tape' with few edits, to more easily edited tapes, followed by the decision to do some of the programmes on film, no general term covering all cases developed. Therefore, for clarity, and not to introduce issues extraneous to this paper, I have adopted the straightforward term 'television drama' to cover any dramatised material shown on television, whether anecdotal, illustrative or, as is the more usual case, a fictional narrative structure.
We must remember that, unlike Britain, America and Europe which had fully developed theatrical traditions long before the mass media arrived, the pattern of culture for Canadian drama developed quite differently. What professional theatre we previously had, was seriously reduced in the Depression. In addition, as Raymond Williams, in Drama in a Dramatized Society, speaking of audiences who for fifty years have had a drama available at the turn of a switch, points out,
what we have now is drama as a habitual experience... . The slice of life, once a projection of naturalist drama, is now a voluntary, habitual, internal rhythm; the flow of action and acting, or representation and performance, is raised to a new convention, that of basic need.3
Our television drama, as a collectively
observed and widely-known body of work, took shape after this fundamental
change in the function of drama occurred. Thus television helped to change
our expectations about all forms of drama before our professional theatre
matured. In fact, from the late 1950s television drama provided the pervasive
context for the average person's experiences of theatre.
A glance at the economics of Canadian theatre adds another detail to television's role as a developmental influence. Canada is still a relatively thinly populated country without many centres of theatre activity, without patrons, without a large number of knowledgeable, sophisticated audiences and finally, without (as yet) a body of dramatic literature familiar to the average citizen. It is a fact that actors, writers, musicians, designers and technicians find it difficult to make a living here. Since the 1930s, CBC radio, and the regional centres of television drama, have kept people working.
To take actors as perhaps the most familiar example, a cross-check of Stratford's cast lists for the early 1960s reveals that many members of the company, including Frances Hyland, Douglas Rain, Leo Ciceri, Hugh Webster, Eric House, Martha Henry, William Hutt, and John Colicos, carried their ensemble playing from the Stratford stage to CBC television and back. They managed to stay in Canada year round because there was radio and television work available between the short seasons of the early years of Stratford.
Television also created a new outlet for Canadian writers. It was a training ground for new playwrights and bread-and-butter (and a training ground in new techniques) for older playwrights. Jack Winter, Bernard Slade and Patricia Joudry were among those who wrote extensively for television before their stage successes. In 1962, David French graduated from the position of CBC mailboy to CBC script writer through Montreal's Shoestring Theatre series. Carol Bolt wrote for The Collaborators in the early 1970s. George Ryga wrote scripts for Shoestring Theatre, Q for Quest and Festival as well as The Newcomers; and Timothy Findley wrote scripts for The National Dream, Jalna and The Newcomers: 1982.
Television drama posed a different challenge for designers for whom there were very few opportunities in Canadian theatre at that time. Even now many designers move back and forth between television and theatre, again one of the ways to remain in or return to Canada. Finally, television drama has been a proving ground for a flock of producers/directors whose careers took them from television into theatre or film and often back again; George Bloomfield, Eric Till and John Hirsch are three among many.4
Early television provided its directors with a freedom to experiment with stage and cinematic conventions. It also demanded that they discover the dramatic conventions best suited to the new medium and its unique characteristics. As those characteristics were identified, and as writers and directors became more experienced with the medium, we find that the forms of television drama began to influence the structure and conventions of stage plays; for example, the narrative conventions borrowed from situation comedy; the use of voice-over as developed in both radio and television; the familiar structure of sequence of vignettes; and television's rapid pacing which has become the norm against which the pace of most of our dramatic forms in the 1980s is measured. Perhaps reflecting the prevailing emphasis on realism which characterized the development of television drama in Canada, from 1975-1983, many realistic plays of the seventies adapted easily to television: Bolt's One Night Stand; Freeman's You're Gonna Be Alright, Jamie Boy; Fennario's On The Job.
Canada is too small a country to afford a television establishment, a theatre establishment and a film establishment. Since our creative people often work in all three media, they bring from the theatre to television a more balanced regard to the values of dialogue and sub-text than that usually seen on programmes in the United States. From television to theatre they bring a fluidity of time and place and a sense of intimate address that characterize modern television drama.
In the early days television performed another important service to the theatre by introducing to the scattered and rural corners of this very large country a significant proportion of the best contemporary and classical world theatre adapted for broadcast. Even in the fifties, with the comparatively crude technology then available, these plays were mounted with sensitivity and imagination. This opportunity to see classical and contemporary drama was particularly important to the potential playwrights, directors and actors in inaccessible corners of the country, who up to that point had no other experience of professionally staged theatre. From the beginning, television also brought to an increasingly large audience two perspectives on Canada: the history of this country, either in purely fictional form or as documentary dramas; and the exploration of controversial issues through topical dramas. It is now a critical commonplace that these two foci have been central to the development of contemporary Canadian theatre.
Even more important, Canadian television drama introduced the country at large to plays which had originated in the Canadian theatre: Morley Callaghan's To Tell The Truth, Ted Allan's The Money Makers;5 Robertson Davies' At My Heart's Core and Fortune My Foe; Harry Boyle's The Inheritance; the New Play Society's version of some of the Coventry miracle plays. Once in a while, it was the television play which became the popular stage play, as in W.O. Mitchell's Back to Beulah, Tom Hendry's Fifteen Miles of Broken Glass, and the Norman Campbell/Don Harron musical, Anne of Green Gables.
Finally, and most important of all for the maturing of the new medium, television produced a handful of brilliant, innovative television plays which stand up superbly to viewing fifteen or twenty years later and which form the core of a valuable heritage often ignored and neglected, particularly in the area of anthology drama. Television anthologies were collections of plays, a different one each week shown in the same time slot under one title. Some anthologies varied considerably in content. Over the ten years of G.M. Presents, the viewers saw many new Canadian scripts, including comedies, tragedies, thrillers, domestic dramas, a western or two, topical dramas and adaptations of short stories. The Unforeseen, running in the early sixties specialised in ironic twists and psychological fables. Q for Quest was an experimental anthology of half-hour dramas, films, concerts and readings. Festival was the proudest ship of the fleet. Here the viewer would find the classics, modern drama, contemporary experiments and some Canadian plays, all free of the 30, 60 or 90 minute strictures imposed by commercials on the other anthologies. Festival also presented concerts, opera and ballet.
Not until 1966 did the CBC follow the American lead to develop 'series' with one leading character who reappears week after week in self-contained episodes. 'Serials', i.e., sequential, interdependent, six- or eight-episode programmes under the general title of The Serial, were also developed in the sixties, long before the American networks thought of doing 'mini-series'.
Innovative in form, adventurous in content, many of the plays from those anthologies and series deserve the same close critical attention we give to stage plays. As critics and theatre historians, we should be more familiar with the work of television playwrights such as Paul St Pierre, Mac Shoub, Charles Israel, M. Charles Cohen, Munroe Scott, Philip Hersch, Len Peterson and George Salverson.
We must also remember that for most people under forty, television provided the first formative, directed and continuous experience of drama. But whether that was the case or not in any particular instance, Canadian television drama played a crucial role for all of us as a mirror in which we saw images of ourselves acted for and by ourselves. Next on the dial to Milton Berle or Maverick were plays written, produced, acted, directed and watched by Canadians; hundreds of plays, performed for millions over the years. All of this, when, for most parts of this country, 'Canadian Drama' meant a couple of plays in the local tryouts for the Dominion Drama Festival and 'theatre' meant a trip into a bigger city for an American touring company version of an old or an untried musical.
Consider the context of international drama in the fifties as television drama in Canada came to life. Most fell into the categories of the realistic well-made play or the drawing room comedy. Plays by Tennesee Williams, Thornton Wilder, William Saroyan, Arthur Miller and Noel Coward were seen only by the handful of Canadians who attended the theatre in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal. Pinter, Beckett and Albee had barely begun to write. Yet in its first decade, 1952-1962, CBC television introduced all of these playwrights to the whole country, as well as plays by Brecht, Pirandello, Lorca, together with classics by Chekov, Shaw, Moliere, Wilde and Ibsen.
Although many years younger than BBC television, as Graham Murdock notes in 'Radical Drama, Radical Theatre', 6 our early television drama outperformed the BBC both in originality of concept and in execution. In 1956 the BBC broadcast 99 full-length plays, 62 of them derived from a stage which was dominated by formula realism usually focused on the conversations of the upper or middle class drawing rooms. Murdock quotes Kenneth Tynan's characterization of that form of theatre as a 'glibly codified fairy world' (p 153). Yet we were producing one new 90-minute play a week on the CBC Television Theatre alone, with many shorter plays in other anthologies. Thus, Murdock accurately describes Canadian television drama as 'adventurous'. That the BBC also thought so is apparent form the CBC sale of 35 play scripts to the BBC (including scripts by Elsie Park Gowan and Patricia Joudry) and the fact that, soon after, the most innovative of the British commercial television networks, Granada, imported CBC Drama supervisor Sidney Newman to give British television drama a jolt. Newman, and then Robert Allen among others, brought along a new group of very talented producer/directors: Harvey Hart, Paul Almond, Mario Prizek, Daryl Duke, Silvio Narizzano, Eric Till, David Gardner and Leo Orenstein. Together they commissioned, adapted, wrote or coaxed into being much of our early television drama.
On the whole, the American plays which were influential in Canada and Britain were mid-fifties works like Paddy Chayevsky's Marty, Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men, J.P Miller's Days of Wine and Roses and Rod Serling's Patterns. These plays are still fondly remembered and have recently been broadcast on PBS. They were also the plays that formed the immediate context for Canadian viewers within reach of the border stations. However the emphasis in most of these plays was psychological realism within the naturalistic style of presentation. Meanwhile our television playwrights and directors were trying their hands at fantasy and surrealism: W.O. Mitchell's Honey and Hoppers, 1957, Paul Almond's version of Clive Exton's complex satire on television, The Close Prisoner, 1964, which uses presentational conventions and subjective points of view; Charles Israel's The Odds and the Gods, 1955, Frank Freedman's Night Admission, 1963, Hugh Webster's Kim, 1963, Jaques Languirand's eerie absurdist drama Grand Exits, 1962, Eric Till's 1960 version of O'Casey's Pictures in a Hallway. Till, Almond and Mario Prizek all had very surrealistic imaginations, ably assisted by designers like Rudi Dorn. All through the sixties the medium's potential for highly individualistic expression was extended, long after the experiments in style and the variety of content afforded by anthology had disappeared in the United States.
Looking back from the vantage of nearly thirty years, we can see the reasons for this early success. The range of dramatic material available on the CBC was evident from the beginning. Mavor Moore was the executive producer of the first season, 1952-53, supervising among other things CBC Television Theatre. Of 34 plays presented, seven were Canadian, four of them adapted from the stage: Morley Callaghan's To Tell the Truth, (according to the press release the first Canadian play staged at the Royal Alex), Ted Allen's The Money Makers, Lister Sinclair's One John Smith and Robertson Davies' Fortune My Foe, Alex Dyer's The Case of Prince Charming, Joseph Schull's The Bridge and Sinclair's Hilda Morgan had been adapted for the series from radio. That season also included North America's first full-length television production of Othello and a two-hour production of Don Giovanni. In the same season, Don Harron, Rita Greer, Stanley Mann, Leslie MacFarlane, and others adapted Leacock's Sunshine Sketches into a half-hour series.
During the 1953-54 season, CBC television (which now formed a network across the country by the simple expedient of filming on kinescope from the monitor which displayed the live production as it was being transmitted and sending the kinescopes across the country) planned to present 'an original 90 minute play every Tuesday night ... broadcast. from 9 o'clock on so that ... the play might not be hampered by the rigid 60 minute structure adapted by the majority of television dramas in the United States.' 7 Mario Prizek, a distinguished producer of television drama since the early days says that the 'live to air' form of early television was a strange hybrid of traditional theatre and cinematic techniques (interview 8 April 1983). For the most part CBC Television Theatre, as the theatre was called, continued on a sustaining basis; that is, without commercials. However, from 20 April 1954 the anthology was retitled General Motors Theatre. For those plays, 'distinguished American and British personalities appear[ed] as hosts and sometimes as lead actors'. The link between a sponsor and guests 'from abroad' was probably not accidental. Television, like film and theatre, can be seduced by the star system or made imitative by lack of confidence. Even so, it was Gratien Gélinas, 'Montreal's Beloved Fridolin', who introduced The Blood is Strong.
Using the CBC's own classifications, we find twelve 'human interest plays', ten 'comedies', five 'tragedies', and six 'melodramas' in the season. The series was described as maintaining 'a high emphasis on the realist plays of ordinary life and light comedies'.8 The Canadian originals written specifically for television that year included Rod Coneybeare's The Grown Ones and The Man Who Ran Away, Stanley Mann's A Business of His Own and The Haven and Edward Rollins' Feast of Stephen. Patricia Joudry adapted her radio play Teach Me How to Cry for the anthology, a significant step on the way to the play's being produced in New York and London, England. Meanwhile, script editors Nathan Cohen and Sidney Newman were out in universities and journalism schools prodding people into submitting scripts. R. L. Jackson quotes Sidney Newman, who was Supervisor of TV drama and of the series until 1958, as saying that 'the primary fact [was] that the audiences were Canadian ... Canadians seeing themselves in dramatic situations always seem to be to me the best way to get them to watch my programs.'9 The success of the series seems to vindicate his point of view.
In the same year, the CBC experimented with a new series called Scope. It was described by the director of programmes, Charles Jennings, as
somewhat similar to CBC's Wednesday Night on radio ... a series intended to offer something for everyone ... It will not adhere to any one theme but will present a wide range of subject matter in various ways some of which will be experimental.10
The first program was to a 90-minute
musical (originally presented on CBC radio's Wednesday Night in March 1954
as The Hero of Mariposa) called Sunshine Town written by
Mavor Moore, orchestrated by Howard Cable, produced by Norman Campbell
and introduced by Tommy Tweed. Folio succeeded Scope in 1955
and lasted until 1960. In five years, Folio offered 70 programmes.
Of these, 24 were original Canadian dramas and several others were Canadian
adaptations of short stories and other material. There were also 14 musical
comedies and revues, all of Canadian origin and most written especially
for television.11
Another series of very special television dramas called First Performance was sponsored by the Bank of Canada during its Canada Savings Bond drives. First Performance had four seasons of four programs each in the month of October. The Colonel and the Lady, starring Douglas Campbell and Katherine Blake, opened the series in 1955. An introduction by Robert Christie to all four linked the series to the Canadian Players. However Lillian Hellman's Monserrat had some of the same cast as that of the Theatre du Nouveau Monde production. Ibsen's A Doll's House followed. The series closed with 55 in Revue, a satirical look at the year's news. In 1956 all four plays were by Canadians: Arthur Halley's Time-Lock and Joseph Schull's O'Brien, both now lost, Leslie MacFarlane's unintentionally racist and unfunny version of the Riel rebellion, Black of the Moon (later balanced by a CBC presentation of John Coulter's Riel) and The Discoverers by Max Rosenfeld and George Salverson, a fine docudrama on the discovery of insulin. In 1957 the plays included Arthur Hailey's The Seeds of Power, about political sabotage of a Canadian power plant in India; Ice on Fire, by Len Peterson, a searching and anti-heroic look at professional hockey; a light comedy (also lost) adapted by Leslie MacFarlane from a Stuart Trueman novel called Cousin Elva and Janey Canuck, Lister Sinclair's amusing and delightful look at Emily Murphy, a feminist who lead the fight to have Canadian Women declared 'persons' by the Privy Council and thus made eligible for all offices in the country. The three plays which have survived in kinescope from the 1958 season were all topical: Lester Powell's Panic at Parth Bay, about nuclear contamination, Mavor Moore's The Man Who Caught Bullets, about the aftermath of the Korean War and Ivor Barry's translation of Marcel Dubé's Man in the House, about working class Montreal.
Festival was Folio's successor and continued to introduce large audiences in English Canada to plays from contemporary French-Canadian theatre, usually using French Canadian actors: The Endless Echo by Jean-Robert Remillard, Bousille and the Just and Yesterday the Children Were Dancing by Gratien Gélinas, Two Terrible Women by André Laurendeau and Grant Exits and The Offbeats by Jacques Languirand.
In the 1956-57 season, another anthology series called On Camera attracted large audiences with plays like Patricia Joudry's A Woman's Point of View and Elsie Park Gowan's Stagecoach Bride. Scripts from this series reappeared in Britain under the title 'Canadian Television Theatre', receving [sic] very favourable reviews. On Camera was a half-hour series which revived the documentary drama and Living Newspaper forms from the theatre of the thirties by adapting similar material to modern circumstances in a new medium. Writers for On Camera turned to newspaper headlines such as 'Why Big League Goalies are Cracking Up' and developed them into plays like Big League Goalie by Mac Shoub. This anthology covered all kinds of subjects: juvenile delinquency, a current murder case, Italian peasants arguing whether or not to plant crops on the grave of a Canadian soldier, the tension between a deeply religious Scot and other citizens of an isolated British Columbia hamlet. As well as using dramatisations to illustrate other themes, the series Explorations presented a program on masks and their uses, Bruno Gerussi on acting technique (using Hamlet) and two half-hours on the Canadian theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called respectively The Golden Age and The Canadian Mirror.
Topical drama continued to be a major focus in the anthologies of the sixties. There was, as well, an emphasis on topical material in series like Cariboo Country, perhaps most notable for its ongoing examinations of relations between Indians and whites, which have not yet been matched either in contemporary theatre or in contemporary television; and Wojeck with its focus on topical issues like accident safety in the construction industry, exploitive homes for the aged and native people displaced in an urban environment. The Manipulators, The Collaborators and the first season of Sidestreet continued the emphasis on docudrama.
In the 1970s, topical dramas were less characteristic of series than of drama specials; for example Ada, a drama about mental illness; Rick Salutin's Maria, shown by unions to locals wishing to organize; They're Drying up the Streets, a hard hitting and memorable film about drugs. This trend continued into the 1980s with A Far Cry from Home, a drama about wife beating; Blind Faith, an imaginatively staged and photographed drama about Televangelism; and Ready for Slaughter, a portrait about the increasing number of bankruptcies among beef farmers.
These plays were part of the country's efforts to grapple with its problems. In fact, television drama can be the first and crucial step in the sociologists' classic 'two step model' for attitudinal change. Our theatre practitioners may well have drawn their attitudes and material in part from the television documentary drama tradition. Moreover such plays, with viewers in the millions, may well have helped develop an audience with a taste for docudrama in the theatre.
In 1960, television anthology drama died in the United States. In Canada we have continued to sustain this form to the present, although in significantly reduced numbers. The respectable viewing figures of television anthology over the years demonstrate that original plays written for television obviously serve a need in Canada to this day.12 The fact that we have welcomed diversity in our television drama has significant implications for our theatre. It is true that Canadians watch a lot of situation comedies, soaps and 'cop' shows as well as television movies for relaxation. But unlike Americans, in the 1960s we also welcomed serials which demanded commitments of time and concentration. For thirty years we have accepted episodes in series which do not have the mandatory poetically-just endings, experiments, mixed genres like the current satirical comedy-thriller series Seeing Things, successful period dramas, and anthology drama, which fits no formula from week to week, portrays no set point of view, relies on no familiar characters - which is in fact much more like live theatre in its range and its potential.
One of the major reasons why anthology drama survived is the fact that for the first fifteen years of CBC television history there were always regular weekly slots allocated to the form, under titles like CBC Television Theatre, Scope, then Folio, and then Festival. To this day, anthology drama is the prestigious programming in the network schedule. In the early 1960s Festival was joined by the experimental half hour anthology Q for Quest, a division of labour which is reminiscent of the traditional allocation of plays in most of our regional theatres, with Festival functioning as the main stage and Q for Quest as the second stage. As a consequence of this commitment, theatre critics of the 1960s seemed to recognize the contribution of CBC radio and television drama as our national theatre of the air. In 1961, Herbert Whittaker, writing about the whole spectrum of radio and television drama on the CBC, pointed out that
For the past twenty-five years, the CBC has supplied most of the dramatic intake of Canada. No other country has had to rely so heavily on one single source for theatrical knowledge, experience and expression. It is undeniable that the CBC has been the major employer of playwrights in this country. For the past twenty-five years, how many people would have been able to earn a living acting except through the CBC? In short, the CBC has subsidized a whole theatre for us for a quarter of a century.
How good has it been? In the field of drama, its taste has been high, its approach both serious and creative... . The Canadian theatre can celebrate the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of its greatest single benefactor this week. Let it be done whole-heartedly. For an organization that is part of a civil service, it has done better than any other untrammeled body you can name. In the field of drama, battling a quarter century of complaint and criticism, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has done a gallant job for the theatre in Canada.13
As one might expect, the perspective
of the New York Times was rather different. However, it was equally
complimentary. Writing three years after the demise of most American anthology
drama, Paul Gardner writing in The New York Times (19 January 1964)
cited with envy the three hours of serious television drama available each
week on the CBC. He listed Kenneth Brown's The Brig,
Fletcher Markle's
adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Wesker's
Roots, Anouilh's Antigone, Albee's The American Dream
and the musical version of Molière's Le Misanthrope (called
The Slave of Love), as recent instances of 'very sophisticated programming'.
Noting 'the opportunities [to actors] to expand their talents', the critic
admired the CBC's unwillingness to build stars and lock actors into roles.
In the same article, Daryl Duke, the executive producer of Q for Quest claimed the anthology's right 'to confront our audience with a tough notion of themselves. Quest is experimental, not in a workshop sense, but in subject matter ... What's wrong with disturbing your audience? Why baby it? Why must television please all of the viewers all of the time?' Thus, some CBC television drama encouraged its audiences to think for themselves, to expect experiment and failure, to seek contemporary issue-valid subjects for dramatic presentation. Programs such as Q for Quest and Festival did not treat the audience as a mass but as groups of people with different tastes and different views.
As one might expect, Nathan Cohen did not agree with Whittaker or the New York Times and would probably not have agreed with many of the arguments I have advanced in this article. In 1966 he wrote 'there was no golden age of T.V. drama for us. We never produced a group of recognized authors identified with a specific programme'. (This is true enough, at least as far as the public was concerned.) Nor, in his view, did TV production of drama on CBC ever achieve 'the glossy consistency of such U.S. anthologies as Kraft Theatre and Studio One and Playhouse 90'. (This is definitely arguable. The production values of Festival, Playdate and other programmes were very professional.) 'Nevertheless, as the network began to grow, and production passed its infancy, TV drama quickly became the closest thing to a national theatre we had in Canada, offering plays that could be seen simultaneously across the country.' He went on to mention specifically the excitement, the tension and the feedback resulting from Arthur Hailey's very competent 1956 thriller Flight Into Danger. Cohen's own observations on what constitute the inherent rules of dramatic form for television are open to question and one can disagree with his generalizations that television drama was never first-class and seldom indigenous in this country. On the latter point in particular the evidence proves otherwise. Nevertheless, I do agree with him without reservation when he says that the bulk of Canadian television anthology had an irresistable appeal for those of us who like a good story well told'.14
As this look at the first few seasons has shown, television drama became the first line of defense along our increasingly tenuous electronic border, as well as the nursery for some distinctively Canadian drama; for example, Q for Quest commissioned George Ryga's Indian and Two Soldiers and provided the first professional production of James Reaney's One Man Masque - called An Evening without James Reaney. Festival introduced Reaney's The Killdeer to a larger audience, Both anthologies commissioned very successful adaptations of works of minor literature which turned into major television plays; for example, Fletcher Markle's version of Katharine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Mac Shoub's adaptation of Chekhov's short story Ward Number 6, 15 and Alvin Goldman's treatment of the obscure Scottish theological thriller The Private Memories and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Festival, which had the longest run (ten years) as the corporation's flagship anthology series was a recognition of television as the preeminent mass medium on the continent, the one medium most people turned to for their drama. The CBC response to these circumstances was a regular program of ballet, opera, concerts and plays offered weekly, nine months of the year. Festival's emphasis on the classics, important modern plays and contemporary drama which was criticized at the time by naturalists, served some useful purposes. It helped to legitimize television as a medium. From the theatrical perspective we can see that it also educated large audiences to a wide variety of dramatic conventions: unit sets, area lighting, the cross-cutting of scenes, the counterpointing of image and word, direct address, surrealistic or impressionistic design. Festival also satisfied knowledgeable audiences by keeping them abreast of developments in modern theatre. Perhaps most important of all, it set a standard for Canadian playwrights and put our own plays in a historical, geographical and geopolitical perspective.
Despite its dependence on government subsidy, Canadian theatre has been remarkably free, although not wholly free from interference. By the end of the 1960s the CBC, whose budget is drawn not from license fees or primarily from advertising but from direct annual grants by Parliament, was given a revised mandate in the form of a revised broadcasting act. Of course, the CBC mandate had been changing from the time the corporation had been founded in the thirties. However, by the end of its first fifteen years of existence, CBC television was expected to contribute to national unity, strengthen our sense of identity, provide a regional balance, show a cross-section of Canadian culture, present controversial issues in a comprehensive and balanced way, strengthen our cultural fabric and serve as a patron to the arts - a set of criteria we would not dream of applying to a national theatre even if we possed such a thing. Expanding our vision to help effect social change, battling censorship and experimenting with form were not yet specifically part of the mandate. Nevertheless, in these areas the CBC performed a signal service for Canadian theatre.
At a time when few Canadian stage playwrights were tackling challenging material or experimenting with new forms, CBC television was developing and broadcasting its own experimental scripts. Thus, for the theatre at large, the CBC through Festival, Quest and local late night anthologies like Montreal's Shoestring Theatre together with occasional drama specials pushed back some of the barriers of censorship; for example, in the 1962-63 season the cold war had reached its deepest freeze. Sponsors censored the content of United States television without mercy.16 However, the CBC presented three plays by Canadian playwrights, The Neutron and the Olive by Rudi Dorn, Jack Cooper's surrealistic anti-war fable The Wounded Soldier, and George Ryga's Two Soldiers, a superbly realistic worm's eye view of the possibility of war. In addition, the CBC produced Marguerite Duras' post-World War III parable The Offshore Island, Bernard Kops' anti-war play The Dream of Peter Mann and John Arden's examination of the causes of war, Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, as well as an adaptation by Alan King of the transcripts of the loyalty hearing of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. They also presented a remarkable Galileo full of CND posters and ironic captions, narrated by an actor playing Brecht with updated references to the cold war.17 Later examples of subject matter which challenged the accepted norms include The Open Grave, which treated the resurrection like a fast-breaking news story using cinema verité techniques; Reddick, a topical drama about a minister's crisis of conscience when confronted with hippies and bikers; and James Saunders' racially mixed Neighbours, a subject which had been anticipated ten years earlier by Joseph Schull's The Concert. When it came to controversy, the CBC adopted the same strategies as regional theatres do to this day. When there were questions in Parliament, letters to the editor, switchboards flooded with complaint, controversy and criticism from many sources, controversial subjects were followed by scripts which were clearly safe and justifiably popular by authors like W.O. Mitchell, Arthur Halley and Bernard Slade. Once in a while, as in the 1960 superb production of Anouilh's Point of Departure, the CBC censored itself by putting the play on at 11.30 pm (12 midnight in Newfoundland). But the decades of controversy and criticism are one sign that Canadian television drama has been healthy, alive and doing its job.
From the theatre historian's point of view, one of the most important contributions which television drama made to our special area of interest was the preservation on fragile, scratched, often distorted kinescopes of the performances of some of our best stage actors in some of their best roles; to name only a few: Martha Henry as Viola in Twelfth Night and as Hilde in The Master Builder; William Hutt as Uncle Vanya and as Ivanoff; Frances Hyland as the Duchess of Malfi and Olga in The Three Sisters, Douglas Rain as Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi and as the Narrator in Under Milkwood; Leo Ciceri as a variety of Wildean heroes and as the Cardinal in The Prisoner; Kate Reid as Masha in The Three Sisters and Mother Courage; Barry Morse as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot; Don Harron as Tegeus in A Phoenix too Frequent. Among other treasures we also find Lorne Greene and Jack Creley in Sartre's The Unburied Dead; Bruno Gerussi as Peer Gynt, Eric House as Sammy, Joseph Shaw as Voltore in Volpone, Leslie Neilsen as John Proctor in The Crucible and Lloyd Bochner as Duke Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi. John Colicos, Douglas Campbell and Barbara Chilcott are also captured on kinescope. In the early 1970s Program X continued to present well-known performers on tape with programmes like An Evening with Kate Reid who played everything from Lady Bracknell to Saint Joan, Evenings with Barbara Hamilton and Gordon Pinsent, Mia Anderson's stage hit Ten Women, Two Men and a Moose and the Dinah Christie/Tom Kneebone Noel Coward Revue from Toronto's Theatre in the Dell.
As the sixties progressed, Festival itself tried to keep the balance between the priorities of showing ourselves to ourselves and showing our best to the world in an international context, a bill of fare not unlike that of most regional theatres today, with similar mixed results. However, in response to changing taste many of the other CBC anthology series did disappear. The desire for higher viewer identification afforded by familiar conventions and predictable characters, as represented by Matt Dillon or Doctor Kildare, meant that the CBC also began to develop series around sets of continuing characters, although not on the whole mimicking the United States genres. Thus we were given Quentin Durgens M.P., Hatch's Mill (about pioneers in 1836), Corwin (a doctor), MacQueen (a journalist), all of them better than average and two of them remarkably high quality: Cariboo Country set in the Chilcotin [sic] Highlands and Wojeck in a very gritty realistic Toronto. Cariboo Country was in no sense an average western, and Wojeck, with its crusading coroner, was not an average cop show (in the fashion of the much later, popular American Quincy.) As in other subsequent series like A Gift to Last, many of the scripts of Wojeck and Cariboo Country are beautifully crafted one-act plays.
Television's role in the development of Canadian theatre, its achievements in the development of Canadian drama cannot be denied. Nevertheless, it must also be admitted that television failed to do justice to Canadian theatre in some respects. In the first two decades, the formal links with theatre were few. True, CBC television did cover the Dominion Drama Festival Finals in documentaries and new features, and scouted the finals for writing and acting talent.18 Very occasionally successful stage productions were adapted for television; for example, Folio presented a shortened version of the Crest Theatre's production of John Osborne's The Entertainer. But only once did the CBC televise a Stratford production, and that not until 1969 when they restaged, with its original cast, The Three Musketeers. Admittedly CBC's Twelfth Night (1964) had many of the same actors as the Stratford production. Nevertheless, there was a lack of attention both in the recording of our theatre history and in the task of bringing our best classical theatre to the country at large that the CBC did not begin to correct until 1981. Problems with ACTRA, obtrusive technology, and greatly reduced budgets explain but do not excuse this.
Looking over lists of plays and playwrights in the period 1952 to 1970, one finds few Canadian plays commissioned from playwrights like Robertson Davies, Merrill Denison and in later years Mavor Moore and Lister Sinclair. Even Centennial Year produced few Canadian plays in the premiere time slot of Festival. Instead, there were repeats from Cariboo Country, Marie Claire Blais' The Puppet Caravan, The Painted Door, adapted from a short story by Sinclair Ross, The True Bleeding Heart of Martin B (which is justly notorious around the CBC as a pretentious failure full of visual and verbal clichés), three collaborations with the National Film Board, and one superbly original piece, Timothy Findley's controversial The Paper People.
At the end of the decade Festival had run its course. Yet in 1969 Bob Blackburn, not a fan of CBC television drama, wrote a lengthy and in many ways a very moving obituary of this long-running program in which he reminded readers that, among other things, it served the purpose of 'creating and sustaining a new Canadian tradition of drama for stage and film as well as television ... So it may be regarded as a past triumph rather than as a present loss.' 19 As the early seventies proved, it was both. From 1968 to 1973 the CBC experienced a period of debilitating loss of confidence and loss of experienced people. However, as Canadian theatres strengthened nationally during the 1970s, with the four-year term of John Hirsch as head of television drama, television drama did broaden its scope to serve Canadian theatre better, even as it continued to develop original scripts of high quality. CBC television recorded for theatre historians of the future, and much more important, presented to the country at large, Toronto Free Theatre's Red Emma, the Toronto Workshop Production of Ten Lost Years, Love and Maple Syrup, Carol Bolt's One Night Stand, David French's Leaving Home, Of the Fields Lately, David Freeman's You're Gonna Be Alright Jamie Boy, Theatre Passe Muraille's The Farm Show, Rick Salutin's 1837, the Centaur Theatre's production of David Fermario's On the Job, Joanna Glass' Artichoke, and the first production in either language on network television of any play by Michel Tremblay, Les Belles Soeurs.
I hope that this brief survey of CBC's achievements in television drama has demonstrated that the CBC, like Othello, could be said to have 'done that State some service'. I wish I could also finish the quotation with equal confidence, 'and they know it', but that is far from clear as budgets are slashed and our ration of Canadian drama, including series, situation comedies and specials is cut to a mere 70 hours for the entire year. No wonder that by 1982, 96% of television drama available to Canadians originates in other countries.19 [sic] The Applebaum-Hébert Committee's proposal to transform the CBC from producer to patron further threatened distinctive Canadan television drama as a force in our cultural life. Only wider recognition of television drama's vital role in our culture since the early fifties will help to change that picture.
Notes
CANADIAN TELEVISION DRAMA 1952-1970: CANADA'S NATIONAL THEATRE
Mary Jane Miller
1 Other researchers will
find television scripts in the York University archives and may gain access
to surviving kinescopes through Mr Sam Kula, Director, National Film, Television
and Sound Archives, Public Archives of Canada. Other kinescopes are located
in Winnipeg, Vancouver and the Montreal headquarters of Radio Canada.
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2 Thanks to the active
cooperation of both the National Film, Television and Sound Archives division
of the Public Archives of Canada and the CBC, I am working on a full-length
study of Canadian television drama where detailed analyses of a selection
of the surviving dramas will appear. As a small sample, the reader might
wish to refer to Canadian Drama, Vol. 9 No. 1, 1983 for publication
of a version of Timothy Findley's script of The Paper People (1967)
and my analysis of it in its various stages of development. The issue also
contains other articles on radio and television drama in Canada and a radio
script by Anne Hébert.
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3 RAYMOND WILLIAMS, Drama
in a Dramatised Society, Cambridge University Press, 1975. Former CBC
President AL JOHNSON'S speech Canadian Programming on Television: Do
Canadians Want It?, CBC, 19 January 1981, p 5 points out that '50 percent
of the viewing time throughout the country is spent in watching drama'.
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4 Television technicians
are less likely to work in both television and theatre. Sound lighting
and special effects for television are quite different skills from those
of the theatre, analogous to film but not live theatre. So the cross-over
among freelance technicians is from television into film rather than from
television into theatre. However, it might be noted that Louis Del Grande
and Martha Gibson, actors, Phil Schreibman, composer, and Dan Yarhi, designer,
all of Seeing Things, come from the Toronto Alternate Theatres.
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5 To Tell the Truth
had its original star, Don Harron, and Director, Mavor Moore. Some
plays did not make the transition comfortably. HERBERT WHITTAKER (The
Globe and Mail, 11 November 1983) complained about a cluttered opening
scene in the television version of At My Heart's Core, pointing
out that time constraints (and, one could add, the lack of detail in the
early TV image) created the problem. On the other hand, he thought the
shortened version of The Moneymakers was more direct and compelling
than the stage version, despite the fact that, as often happened, one of
the four cameras had broken down in the live transmission (Globe and
Mail, 12 May 1952). Producer-directors often did their own editing
of the texts for broadcast.
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6 G. MURDOCK, in Media
Culture and Society, 2:2, April, 1980, pp 151-168
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7 CBC Press Release, undated,
on deposit in York television drama archives, York University, Downsview,
Ontario
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8 CBC Television Theatre
file (undated), York Archives
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9 R.L. JACKSON, An historical
and analytical study of the origin, development and impact of the dramatic
programs produced for the English language networks of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, Wayne State thesis, 1966, p 121, quoting a letter from
Newman (then at the BBC) dated 3 February 1965. Though Jackson recounts
valuable interviews with people now gone, regrettably the thesis (a copy
of which is on deposit in the CBC reference library) presents very little
analysis of the dramas themselves. It seems unlikely that he was able to
see any actual programmes.
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10 CBC Press Release,
Ottawa, 12 December 1954, ALEX BARRIS in The Globe and Mail, 12
July 1954, called it a 'Sort of Canadian "Omnibus"' and by 1 October 1955,
BOB BLACKBURN in The Ottawa Citizen already judged it too 'arty'.
The twin premises of false analogy to U.S. programming and the assumption
that CBC television should serve the mass not the pluralist audience marred
a lot of television criticism in that period - and still does.
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11 CBC programme lists
from that period, CBC Archives. I have seen all of the surviving kinescopes
of First Performance, Scope, Folio, Festival, and most of Q for
Quest, as well as selected kines from other anthologies and series.
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12 As an example, I can
cite ten million viewers for the first seven dramas of the 1981 season,
a figure taken from Canadian Programmes on Television: Do Canadians
Want It?, pp 9-10. Cf. also Baptizing -2.5 million; Ten Lost
Years - 1.8 million; The Winnings of Frankie Walls - 1.4 million.
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13 Quoted in E.A WEIR,
The Struggles for National Broadcasting in Canada Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1965, pp 394-395.
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14 The Daily Star,
Toronto, 21 May 1966. Cohen goes on to point out how many CBC trained
writers and directors have gone abroad to the U.S. or the U.K. and adds
that one of the problems of CBC drama is the CBC failure to develop a formal
training workshop for writers. Both points are well taken.
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15 Originally adapted
for radio, the rewritten script became a very fine piece of television
craftsmanship. Joseph Schull's The Concert, referred to below, went
through the same transformation, becoming a quite different but no less
moving drama.
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16 Cf. EDITH EPHRON, 'Television:
America's Timid Giant' TV Guide, 18 May 1963, in TV Guide: The
First Twenty-Five Years, compiled and edited by JAY S. HARRIS, New
York: New American Library, 1978, pp 75-79.
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17 Through the Kastner
family who often translated plays such as Galileo for producer Mario
Prizek, Helene Weigel heard of the production, requested a kinescope for
a look and then obtained a copy for the Archives of the Berliner Ensemble
(Prizek, interview, 4 August 1983). In this production, after Galileo's
last line asking about the weather that night and his daughter's reply
'fine', the camera cut to a closeup shot of a CND poster of the blinding
flash of a nuclear detonation.
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18 In its first season
Shoestring Theatre restaged for television Gwen Pharis Ringwood's
Lament for Harmonica (14 March 1960) from the Ottawa Little Theatre
Workshop Playwriting Competition using the leading actress from the Ottawa
production. Later, its successor Teleplay
broadcast her The Deep
Has Many Voices (4 December 1967). Shoestring Theatre also broadcast
Leonard Cohen's The New Step (31 May 1964). Patricia Joudry, James
B. Nichol, Al Purdy, George Ryga, and David French joined Molière,
Ionesco, Beckett, Chekhov, Kopit, Fratti, Ghelderode and John Whiting as
authors used in the anthology. CBOT Ottawa and CBLT Toronto both broadcast
Shoestring Theatre for a season; however the adult emphasis of the
anthology created some not unexpected problems in Toronto because of the
4-4.30 late afternoon timeslot for the rebroadcast of the kines.
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19 The Telegram
(Toronto), 3 May 1969 * [Note: there are two #19 endnotes listed in the
article]
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20 JOHNSON, op cit,
p 9. John Kennedy, the current Head of TV Drama, forced to cut back,
has made the difficult decision to fill those hours with original Canadian
material, not with experiments or classics from the theatre or contemporary
drama. It is hard to fault his priorities, but the cost is a diminished
range of drama and the loss of a contemporary international context for
Canadian material.
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