Saturday Night Radio Drama - Ellen Dryden - Any Other Name And an editorial, of sorts.

A woman teacher disappears. There is no reason for her to leave home, a long term partner, two children and a job she loves. Then her car is found, with her blood inside, and her partner is held by the police for questioning......

David Bamber 
Teresa Gallagher
Carl Prekopp, 
Helen Longworth, 
Richard Firth, 
Laura Doddington.
Directed by Marc Beeby.

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I was thinking of just posting the same plays by Gordon Pengilly I posted last Tuesday and recommend them again, I like them so much.   While watching, really listening to a Youtube of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and thought of what Pengilly said in the introduction to a small collection of his work, Metastasis And Other Plays:

My first professional show was a CBC radio production of my one-act play Seeds, directed by Mark Schoenberg in 1977.  the play worked well on radio, and I remember saying to myself how I'd like to do more of that.  Eight years later I moved to Calgary from Toronto (where I'd spent three years) to become resident playwright with Theater Calgary.  I soon ran into Martie Fishman, who was producing drama for CBC radio and, over the next dozen years or so, we created some fifteen hours of radio drama together.  I love writing radio plays, sort of the poor man's screenplay, the movie-in-your-ear, as it were, where you can really go places and blow things up if you want to, and for a fraction of the cost of making a movie.  Being at the bottom of the sea in a nuclear submarine is no more difficult to produce than popping the top off of a can of beer.  And those of you who haven't ventured beyond The Shadow or Jake and the Kid - well, you can't know how poetic and sophisticated and experimental radio drama can be in the hands of people like Pinter, Beckett, Stoppard, and Dylan Thomas.

Only, much as I like Pinter, I kept thinking as I listened to his play that I'd really rather have been listening to Pengilly,  the obscurity of even a Pinter can get old and needs to be taken in smaller doses.  I can't much take absurdist theater at all anymore, there's nothing there but sensation and that gets tiresome, too.

What Gordon Pengilly said in that passage, especially about the poetry, sophistication and experiment that you can find so abundantly in radio drama - as well as the merely entertaining and thoroughly traditional (nothing wrong with those if they're good) - is why I like it and find I can't much watch movies anymore.  Radio drama spoiled the movies for me.  I realized on reading that passage that it was just about the same time I started listening to drama on shortwave in the 1980s that I started not watching movies much.

If the CBC board had its wits about it, they'd revive radio drama up there.  You don't want to end up like the Staters, do you?   You don't want your domestic theater and TVs to turn into rote cop shows and thrillers hoping to get on in the States.   Someone I know who went on the movies, as they used to say, said the only thing good about the movies was the money.