Talk radio: Rose Scollard revisits radio plays with new book, Love and War Western Style
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When Calgary playwright Rose Scollard and her family moved from Ireland to rural Ontario in 1948, their first family home was less than luxurious.
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It was the upper floor of a house outside of River Canard, a small hamlet south of Windsor, Ont. There was no running water. A pot-bellied coal stove was used to cook all the meals and was the only source of heat. Scollard's father thought he had landed an office job in Ontario working as a clerk for the Ford plant. But upon the family's arrival, he discovered it had fallen through. It was October, and it was already cold and snowy that year. So Scollard's parents dipped into what was left of their savings to buy warm clothing for the kids and a few pots and pans.
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Scollard, who was born in a small town in Northern Ireland in 1939, had spent her early childhood listening to British radio programs during the war years. The family would gather around the 'wireless', as it was then known, in her grandparents' house. Being without a radio seemed unimaginable.
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'(My father) couldn't get a job and there wasn't much housing available, either, so we had to go live out in the country,' says Scollard, in an interview from her home in Calgary. 'We lived on this lonely road at the top of this old house with no plumbing. But there was electricity. They bought a few bits of furniture and a radio. That's what got us through the winter.'
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Scollard's father eventually found a job on the railroad, and the family built a new home. It was still in the country, and the family suffered through a few weeks with no electricity and no radio. One day, when trudging home from school, Scollard and her sister saw the porch light alit at their home. Radio was back in their lives, as was the melodramatic radio programs from Detroit such as Lux Radio Theatre, The Philip Morris Playhouse, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger and Boston Blackie.
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In 1953, Scollard's family followed some of their neighbours' lead and purchased a television. Radio offered access to a new world for Scollard, a lifeline and way to connect to a new country. For her, television was less miraculous.
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'I found it very flat and uninteresting because you weren't doing that imaginative work,' she says.
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It's hardly surprising that radio drama became a part of Scollard's creative DNA, even if opportunities to write them weren't abundant. For a brief period in the 1990s, Scollard wrote radio plays for CBC. Her first was an adaptation of a sci-fi/horror play, The Chosen, that CBC producer and writer Mark Schoenberg had seen at the Edmonton Fringe Festival and commissioned for Vanishing Point, a drama series.
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Scollard says writing radio plays was the most fun she has ever had in her professional career, which has included a long run in the theatre, founding the women-centred theatre company Maenad Productions, and co-founding literary press Frontenac House with her husband, David. Unlike with live theatre, most of the production headaches were taken care of by CBC's technicians and director Martie Fishman at the studios on Westmount Boulevard. There were no opening-night jitters because, for the most part, it was all pre-recorded.
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