JOHN DRAINIE

When John Drainie died, in 1966, he was only fifty. But in a sadly short career, he achieved much, being widely recognized as the greatest radio actor in the English-speaking world.

His vocation came to him when he was still a teenager, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and his budding career was not interrupted by the war: he volunteered in 1940, but was turned down because of his ruined leg, smashed in a traffic accident. There was little outlet for his talent in Vancouver then, but he scraped by on a multitude of local radio Jobs, on the strength of his flexible voice — he came to be known, in due course as “the man with a thousand voices”.

It was just then that Andrew Allan arrived in Vancouver, who would become one of the world’s foremost director-producers of radio drama. He immediately spotted Drainie’s enormous potential, and hired him. And he gathered around him a company of actors and a stable of writers, who jointly founded a solid tradition of CBC radio drama that ranked with any created elsewhere. Indeed, Canada and Britain can be jointly credited with having transformed a hitherto humdrum genre into a serious and challenging new art. They did not invent radio drama. It already existed, but in an entirely makeshift and unimaginative way. Allan’s great gift was to take it seriously and apply to it all the resources of a fine, cultivated mind and boundless energy. He encouraged aspiring writers to tackle the issues of the day with unsparing honesty, to write with great care for language, and to exploit all the technical and artistic possib­ilities of the medium. And he pushed aspiring actors towards mastery of their highly specialized craft. The acknowledged master of it was Drainie, and his relationship with Allan was a kind of artistic symbiosis. His development as an actor owed much to Allan’s vision and discipline. But there can be no doubt that Allan’s success owed equally much to Drainie’s genius. Together, it seemed there was nothing they could not do.

When Andrew Allan and John Drainie moved to Toronto in 1943, they inaugurated the famous weekly series “CBC Stage”, which was an instant success on two levels. It was an artistic success, in that it addressed Canadian life with a valid sense of Canadian values, speaking with an authentic Canadian voice, not with American or British accents or attitudes, and it did so with literate scripts performed by highly skilled casts. And it was a public success, in that it readily acquired a vast and enthusiastic audience (second only to the hockey broadcasts), much to the chagrin of a senior CBC executive, whose tastes were at best middlebrow and who undoubtedly thought that Allan’s writers were a bunch of long-haired socialists out of touch with Canada at large: listeners disagreed, and tuned in, every Sunday night, in droves.

On “CBC Stage” and on the radio plays included in “CBC Wednesday Night”, Drainie was the unchallenged star — though a sadly underpaid one. For Allan and all the other producers, he played hundreds of roles; and he brought to them not only the dexterity of a vocal virtuoso, but also a seemingly limitless grasp of character and a sharp intellect. Above all, though, he had an impeccable sense of language: his rhythm and tempo were faultless, always matched to the style of the author, equally at the service of grave sorrow or antic laughter, of high rhetoric or flat demotic — and all this was achieved by reading from a script he had marked, in minute detail of every nuance, with his own indecipherable brand of hieroglyphics.

Perhaps the most famous of his roles for Allan, and certainly one of the most remarkable, was as the nameless, McCarthy-like figure in “The Investigator”. The script was commissioned from Reuben Ship by Allan at the height of the McCarthy witch-hunt, when a paranoid hounding of supposed Communist moles in Hollywood and Washington was paralyzing liberal thought all over the United States. Sensing that this Cold War blight was infecting Canada, too, Allan mounted a counter-offensive on “CBC Stage”, with a sense of some urgency. The script portrayed an Investigator who delved mercilessly and groundlessly into people’s lives and behaviours in a way that was repulsively sinister but, in the end, so extreme as to be both absurd and ridiculous. Allan scheduled the script as soon as he could, and cast Drainie in the leading role. Drainie, who had long been fascinated by and disgusted with McCarthy, now glued himself to the television coverage of the senatorial hearings, and arrived for rehearsal with the McCarthy persona nailed down exactly, complete with every gross vocal inflection and slimy attitude. It was a tour de force. The immediate reaction in Canada was a rallying of enlightened minds against the powers of darkness, a reaction somewhat tinged with the smug feeling that things were different south of the border. The reaction in the northern States, where CBC radio was widely listened to, was equally strong — so strong, in fact, that a bootleg recording of the program developed a cult following among the many Americans disgusted by McCarthy and, in a small way, it contributed to his eventual downfall and disgrace.

If Drainie, as the Investigator, was using his acting skills mainly as impersonator of a real-life man, that was outside the normal practice of his craft; formally in character roles, his task was to create a fictional or historical person in a way that was humanly convincing and authentic to the setting. For example, he was striking in the title-roles of “Richard II” by Shakespeare and “Mr Arcularis” by Conrad Aiken, both directed by Andrew Allan. For Arthur Hiller and Esse Ljungh, he played the Saskatchewan farmhand, Jake, in W.O. Mitchell’s beloved series, “Jake and the Kid”. And when I inherited John Drainie, so to speak, after Allan retired, he did astonishingly varied work for me in a great many programs, not all of them dramatic. As a director, I learnt much from working with him. I will always be grateful to him for that. And I am proud to list some of the highlights of our time together in the studio.

Apart from Shakespeare, he excelled in Greek tragedy, notably Sopho­cles. His portrayal of Jesus, in a script I adapted from the mediaeval mystery plays, had none of the effete and sanctimonious flaws that so often mar that portrayal by other actors — “At last,” one fellow cast member exclaimed, “a Jesus with balls on!”. In George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, he somehow transformed himself, compellingly and touchingly, into a horse, the lovable Boxer. In Anatole Prance’s “Penguin Island”, he was a centenarian monk. From the King James Bible, he played Job. In Lister Sinclair’s “Encounter by Moonlight”, based on “The Golden Bough”, he was the young man trying to usurp power in an ancient myth. He played Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Scots, Welshmen, and almost every variety of North American you care to name, of any age from adolescence to senility. As narrator, he provided a regular outlet for Canadian writers on his series of “Stories with John Drainie”. And as a reader of poetry, he was superb: verse in the great lyric tradition came from him easily and gracefully, and without the vocal narcissism that wrecks so many readings of it; but when it came to some of the more difficult moderns, he brought to the text not only an open mind to new challenges of style, but also a dogged insistence on analyzing even the most obscure passages and on finding a way, out loud, to clarify their meaning — two of his outstanding successes in that field were with passages from the “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot, and with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ intricate, almost baffling, extended sonnet “That Nature is an Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”.

Always the complete professional, Drainie tackled every job with zest, flexibility, and courtesy to his colleagues. Not even cancer could keep him from his vocation. Only a few days before he died, he came into the studio to tape scenes from a Broadway two-hander with his wife Claire Murray (for ever immortal as Ma in “Jake and the Kid”). No longer able to stand, he had to perform lying down, on a folding lawn chair, with a boom microphone above him. He had deliberately gone off his pain-killers twenty-four hours earlier, wanting to be sure that his faculties would be unclouded during what was surely going to be his last performance. Between takes, he was clearly in agony. But on every take, the old warrior rose to the challenge: it was impossible to tell there was anything wrong. So the final accolade has to be that he was more than just a very great actor, he was a very brave man.

After John Drainie died, his fellow-actors funded an annual award, in his name, to be given to any Canadian who had done much to maintain or advance a tradition of excellence in broadcasting. No bylaws restricted the award to radio or, more narrowly, to radio drama. But such had been the impact of Drainie’s a career, that for many years the award was mostly given to people who had worked with him or followed in his footsteps: to actors and actresses, to playwrights, to composers of incidental music, and to directors. Nowadays, not much radio drama is aired by the CBC, and not much of that has importance. So the John Drainie Award is now more diffusely given to people in other fields of broadcasting, television included. That is as it should be, for excellence should be rewarded wherever we can find it. But the suspicion lurks in my mind that John Drainie’s ghost, if it has nothing better to do than consider the current state of the CBC, would shake his head sadly and turn his attention to whatever he can find in actors’ Heaven that could adequately engage his gifted heart and mind.

Meanwhile, of course, most of what he achieved on this earth does survive, accessibly, on the shelves of the CBC archives. It is a record well worth preserving for anyone who wants to remember, or to discover, that once upon a time, if not any longer, CBC radio was touched with greatness.