Marjorie Lynette Sigley - Life and Work

Life and Work

Marjorie Sigley was born on December 22, 1928, known to everyone as "Sigi", she took passionate pleasure in the arts and would travel huge, impractical distances to see a play, a ballet or an opera. But she also believed in art as an educational force, and her greatest achievement lay in pioneering many of the attitudes towards children's drama that we now take for granted. Sigley not only introduced thousands of children to what she called "the wonder of theatre", she also involved them directly in the making of it.

Sigley came from "a solid, very traditional" working-class family in Buxton, Derbyshire, where her father worked for ICI and her mother was a professional cook. From the age of 10, she became an avid consumer of movies and plays, going to everything that was staged at the Buxton repertory theatre. As a student she attended Goldsmith's College, London, studying theatre, music and dance.

She was awarded a fellowship at Manchester University's drama department and it was there that she began to develop her (then novel) concept of children's drama. She became involved in theatre workshops and participation theatre, taking groups of her students to the Brighton Festival with their work. She was later to direct the Malcolm Williamson opera Julius Caesar Jones as part of the festival's opera workshops.

She returned to London to a teaching career, which she combined with her drama activities. At Markfield and Woodlands Park Schools in North London, she began by adapting stage classics for performance by young children who mostly come from underprivileged backgrounds. The children were also encouraged to write, cast, design, produce and star in their own productions. In 1960, Marjorie founded the City Literary Drama Company. This presented its own work, ranging from original pantomimes to experimental mime and movement workshops at the City Lit Theatre, with people such as Ronald Smith Wilson, Claud Newman, and Dorothea Alexander. In 1968 the company visited Warsaw, Leningrad and Moscow with its children's drama programmes.

In the meantime she worked as a director and writer at the Mermaid Theatre, notably directing a stage version of Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives. She was invited for two spells, 1962 and 1968–69, at the Habimah National Theatre of Israel and in 1964 did a Youth Theatre tour of Czechoslovakia.

She had also taken the step into television in 1964 when she was invited to demonstrate what children's drama could achieve in a late-night ABC programme. Her contribution, which graphically demonstrated how the potentially destructive energies of teenage boys in a London suburb could be channelled creatively, made a profound impression. She was busy in television thereafter, one of her most striking contributions being Wonderworld, two 13-part series in which children in the 5-6 and 15-16 age groups, dramatised and acted stories from the Bible.

In 1965 Marjorie Sigley introduced the Five O'Clock Funfair (Rediffusion, 1965) a spin-off series which regularly featured amongst others, music icons Lulu and Alexis Korner.

Like all her programmes, these were outstanding for their intimate engagement with the lives and opinions of children. In 1966, she formed the Young People's Theatre Project to train primary school teachers on how to bring her methods into the classroom. And in 1969 she also ran workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Roundhouse and the Brighton Festival, which were significant forerunners of the educational programmes run by arts institutions today. In the autumn of the same year she delivered a talk on Children's Drama to the Youth Libraries Group.