Lister (Shedden) Sinclair | Biography

Lister Sinclair was a prolific and distinguished radio dramatist during the golden age of Canadian radio in the 1940s and 1950s. Canadian National Theatre on the Air, 1925-1961 , Howard Fink's descriptive bibliography of broadcast radio scripts, attributes 183 plays to Sinclair during the period covered by the inventory. Sinclair has also had a long career as a radio and television producer, actor, and program host.

The son of W. Shedden Sinclair, a chemical engineer, and his wife, Lillie Agnes Sinclair, Lister Shedden Sinclair was born on 9 January 1921 in Bombay, India. Sent back to England when he was three to be raised in relatives' homes and boarding schools, Sinclair came to Canada at the age of eighteen to study at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. There he met his first wife, Alice Mather, and married her in 1942, the same year he earned his B.A. Alice Mather Sinclair has made a significant contribution to the development of Canadian electronic drama through her work as a story editor for the CBC. One son was born to this marriage, which ended in divorce; Sinclair had another son by his second wife, Margaret Watchman, whom he married in 1965.

After completing his M.A. at the University of Toronto in 1945, Sinclair was a lecturer in mathematics there until 1948. In 1944 he began to work part-time as an actor and writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a connection which has continued, with only short breaks, until the present. When CBC-Television was established in 1952, he became one of the first writers to contribute to that medium in Canada and has since written many scripts; he has served as executive producer of various television series; he became an executive producer in 1967; from 1972 to 1975 he was the CBC's executive vice-president; and from 1975 to 1980, vice-president in charge of program policy and development. He has returned to his original profession, teaching, from time to time, having been appointed to the staff of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto in 1952 and of the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University in 1983.

Even more than stage plays, radio plays seem fated to disappear; still, some of Sinclair's scripts are held by the library of Concordia University in Montreal and an unusually large number have appeared in print. In 1948 twelve were published as A Play on Words and Other Radio Plays. The range of style is great: All About Emily and We All Hate Toronto are witty satires on contemporary values; Oedipus the King is a stark and vibrant retelling of the myth; and several, among them No Scandal in Spain and You Can't Stop Now, are strong pleas for a new and peaceful world. Walter Goldschmidt's 1954 anthology, Ways of Mankind, includes thirteen playlets, seven by Sinclair, dramatizations of anthropological concepts broadcast by an American educational network. Sinclair's pieces demonstrate an unusual ability to combine documentary and dramatic material, a skill he later employed to write episodes for NBC's Democracy in America, based on Alexis de Tocqueville's book about his historic visit to investigate American society. Scripts by Sinclair and George E. Probst for this series were published in book form in 1962.

Sinclair's work on behalf of broadcasting in Canada has been recognized by the John Drainie Award for contributions to broadcasting and the Sandford Fleming Medal, which the Royal Canadian Institute awarded him in 1984. He has also won ten of the Ohio State Awards for Educational Radio and Television Programs and holds honorary doctorates from four Canadian universities, including the University of British Columbia and Memorial University of Newfoundland. In 1985 he was made an officer of the Order of Canada.

While most of his writing has been for the electronic media, Sinclair has rewritten some of the scripts for the stage. Only The Man in the Blue Moon was written first for the stage. A tragicomic piece about a meek mathematician who invents a death ray, it became, in 1947, the first Canadian play produced by Dora Mavor Moore's New Play Society, in a production directed by Sinclair; on other occasions Sinclair acted for NPS. Summing up the 1947-1948 Toronto theater season in the Canadian Jewish Weekly, the influential Canadian critic Nathan Cohen identified Sinclair as foremost among postwar Canadian playwrights, but qualified his praise: "He is distinguished by a singular loveliness of language and brooding wit, but his plays as a whole are deficient in characterization, cloudy in meaning, and promiscuous in technique." Socrates was produced by the Jupiter Theatre in Toronto in 1952 and published in 1957; the familiar story of the philosopher's arrest on false charges is given fresh immediacy by Sinclair's sharp but homely dialogue and by some intriguing speculation concerning Socrates' friendship with Aristophanes.

The Blood is Strong is Sinclair's best-known stage play; the original script was for a radio play broadcast in 1945; the stage play premiered in 1952; a television version was produced in 1954. The central image is the family as "garrison" (to use Northrop Frye's term): the MacDonalds try to make a new home in the woods of Cape Breton Island after emigrating from the Isle of Skye in the early nineteenth century. Murdoch, the family patriarch, attempts to preserve Scottish values in an alien wilderness, but the wilderness becomes home instead to his family. Young love triumphs when daughter Kate marries Barney, an uncouth colonial hunter, and through the deaths of a son and his wife, MacDonald acquires another link to the new land, through "blood purchase." In form the play is quite orthodox, but Sinclair stretches the possibilities of realism by using Scots and colonial dialects, as well as song and Scripture, to heighten the language and sharpen the contrasts.

It has been some time since Sinclair has published creative work, although he collaborated with Jack Pollock to write The Art of Norval Morrisseau (1979), a study of the celebrated native Indian painter. A man of many parts and many arts, he has, of late, been devoting most of his time to music, as a musician, music critic, and producer of music programs on the CBC. He is currently president of the Canadian Conference of the Arts, host of the CBC-Radio program Ideas, and, since 1983, has been the host of the Festival of the Sound, an annual musical event held in Parry Sound, Ontario.