Remembering Buzz Goodbody, 50 years on
An evening devoted to the life and times of one of the greats of the Royal Shakespeare Company
Buzz Goodbody was a pioneering Royal Shakespeare Company director who died 50 years ago, and the anniversary of her passing was marked last night by a beautiful, poignant event that took place at the Arcola Theatre in east London.
The Arcola production currently running in its downstairs space is a work very much in the Buzz Goodbody spirit — experimental and studio scale — in which her nephew Adam Goodbody is both co-writer and one of the two actors who perform it.
What was special about this performance of Petty Men — a tale set backstage at a production of Julius Caesar, with Adam Goodbody and John Chisham playing the frustrated, fretful understudies for Cassius and Brutus — was that it was followed by a fascinating panel discussion about the life and legacy of Buzz Goodbody.
Chairing the panel was Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University. She’s been a brilliant voice on Radios 3 and 4 in recent years, her contributions including the 2023 series Taking Issue with Shakespeare, produced by Beaty Rubens, about whom I’ve written elsewhere here.
Smith’s two guests could not have been more eminent — Trevor Nunn, who was artistic director of the RSC during Buzz’s time before going on to conquer the wider theatre world; and the current joint artistic director of the RSC Tamara Harvey.
Buzz, Trevor Nunn recalled, had started out in the late 1960s as secretary to his predecessor in the artistic director’s chair, John Barton. When Barton appointed Nunn to be his successor — the audience joined Nunn in laughing at this story because the appointment process seemed to follow no protocols whatsoever — Nunn immediately gave Buzz a fully creative role.
At the time the RSC had a scheme called Theatre-go-Round — taking plays into schools and other settings away from its main stages in Stratford and London — and these were the productions that Buzz cut her teeth on. Soon she was directing such greats-to-be as Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley.
“She was christened Mary but the family nickname for her was Buzz because she had so much energy,” Nunn recalled. “It said everything about her. She was ferociously political. We’d have discussions about pure Marxism and how everything had gone when it became Communism.” For a while, we learnt, Buzz and Nicol Williamson — one of the greats of 1970s RSC acting — lodged in the large house in Stratford that came with the artistic director’s job. That sounded like a lively set-up, with Williamson regaling people with his pop-and-poetry routines.
London in the early 1970s teemed with grassroots theatre — rooms above pubs and other spontaneous venues — and the RSC set up a performance space on the Euston Road called The Place. Then came The Other Place — its off-main stage venue in Stratford that had started out as a tin shack originally used to store props and costumes. Nunn reminded us of a line from Hamlet: “If your messenger find him not there, seek him i’ th’ other place yourself”.
Buzz Goodbody was at the heart of these developments. The RSC’s first female director, she was working on a production of Hamlet when she took her own life at the age of 28. A glittering career had been under way, and Nunn said he still couldn’t understand what led her to that decision.
Tamara Harvey talked about Buzz’s legacy. “If ever I feel we’re being a bit safe, it’s as if Buzz is always there to remind us not to be.” Buzz’s manifesto for theatre was still being referred to, she said, half a century on.
As what you might call a theatre person at school and university, I knew Buzz’s name and of her reputation, but I never saw anything she directed. The nearest I got was seeing Nicol Williamson at the RSC in Stratford playing Macbeth (Lady Macbeth: Helen Mirren) in 1975, a production directed by Trevor Nunn. It remains one of the highlights of my theatre-going life.
It was quite something to hear Nunn, who is now 85, looking back on those times, and it was altogether a remarkable evening that brought past and present together very powerfully. It ended with Buzz’s older brother John Goodbody delivering a moving series of thanks to all those who had made it possible.
Petty Men — written by Adam Goodbody, John Chisham and Júlia Levai, and performed by Adam Goodbody and John Chisham, is on at the Arcola Studio 2 until 20 December. There was a time, I feel, when such a venture might have had an afterlife on Radio 3, but I think those days are gone. That’s not to say that the show lacks a physical dimension or isn’t eye-catchingly staged. Far from it. But the writing is great. The play is funny, dark, absurdist, and I suppose you could call it Beckettian. But its inspiration is Buzz Goodbody.