Theatre has always been Margaret's passion.  While still in school she queued for the cheap seats at theatres in London, and saw the first productions of many seminal plays such as Waiting for Godot, the Birthday Party, Taste of Honey, the Marat Sade.  She studied drama, taking classes from Bob Cobbing, a performance artist and concrete poet and Keith Johnstone who went on to spearhead important work in improvisation.  She began writing plays when she was a teenager, winning a competition for young playwrights launched in honour of the newly built Coventry Cathedral.   Meanwhile, she worked at a variety of jobs and spent a year teaching English in Verona, Italy.    

 

Persuaded that the British theatrical hierarchy was too tough to penetrate, she trained as a librarian, completing her professional qualifications (A.L.A) at Loughborough College of Further Education, (now Loughborough University).   She worked in London lending and reference libraries, including the Bishopsgate Institute in the City, before moving to Oxford where she toured North Oxfordshire villages with a mobile library.  She left England in 1966 on a bus to Kathmandu.   The bus broke down in Iraq. She continued the journey alone, through the Middle East and the Far East and ending the journey in Japan where she taught English and worked in a bar before making her way back to England via the Trans-Siberian Railway.   The book she wrote, with advice for women who were travelling alone was rejected by publishers who felt it would be difficult to find a readership.    

 

 She immigrated to Canada in 1968, settled in Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay) and became Chief Librarian at the Fort William Public Library.  She has a B.A from Lakehead University, majoring in psychology and completed graduate studies at the University of British Columbia where she gained an MFA in Theatre and Creative Writing.  Margaret went on to make a career in drama, teaching and writing for radio, T.V. and film, but above all for theatre. She has given readings at festivals, libraries, bookshops and academic institutions across the country. Known as a feminist, her work is  well summarized in an article in the Canadian Encyclopaedia written by Tony Dawson.  She spearheaded the second International Women Playwrights Conference in Toronto in 1992 and continued as the lead Canadian delegate for five of the ensuing conferences that take place every three years in centres across the world.   

 

 

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