Happy Birthday Buzz Goodbody
The Marxist feminist theatre director Mary Ann ‘Buzz’ Goodbody would have been 79 today. This blog is based on the entry I wrote for her in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Theatre Directors (ed. Maria M. Delgado and Simon Williams).
Buzz Goodbody
Mary Ann ‘Buzz’ Goodbody (1946-1975) was British director and activist. In a career that spanned only eight years from directing a student production of Dostoyevksy’s Notes from Underground to an acclaimed production of Hamlet starring Ben Kingsley at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1975, Buzz Goodbody did more to change the British theatre than most directors achieve in decades.
Goodbody rose initially to prominence as a director thanks to her relatively privileged upbringing. Like her future employers in the theatre, Goodbody was privately educated (at Francis Holland School and Roedean), though unlike most of them she did not go on to Oxbridge but instead to the newly established Sussex University (1964-67), a decision she took deliberately as a rejection of her class position and embrace of Marxist feminism. While at Sussex, Goodbody staged plays outside theatre spaces as the university had no auditorium for student drama. When her Notes from Underground won a prize at the 1967 National Student Drama Festival and was shown at the Garrick Theatre in London, it caught the attention of John Barton of the RSC, who offered Goodbody a role he described as his ‘Girl Friday’ (both rehearsing understudies and ironing his shirts). Where others might reasonably have rejected such an offer, Goodbody accepted it, and while insecurely employed at the RSC, she linked up with its literary manager, Mike Stott, and the director Mike Leigh. From 1968, this trio along with Goodbody’s husband, Edward Buscombe (they separated in 1969), toyed with the idea of establishing a community theatre, but dropped it in 1970, when Goodbody also joined the activist Women’s Street Theatre Group. The themes of community engagement, democratic collectivity and counter-hegemonic politics, typical of the historical moment of 1968, would go on to shape Goodbody’s engagements with the RSC, where she had continued to work as an assistant director.
Goodbody was first promoted to full directorial responsibility at the RSC by Terry Hands, who asked her to direct a tour of King John for Theatregoround, the company’s educational enterprise. Goodbody’s production centred on the character of the Bastard, whose analysis of ‘commodity, the bias of the world’ served as the root of Goodbody’s reading of the play’s exploration of the cynicism of political strategy. Combining an aesthetic reminiscent of Brecht and Littlewood with a political sensibility formed in the struggles of 1968, King John clearly announced a powerful directorial talent. Goodbody followed it with two projects – Strike and Arden of Faversham – that she did not complete, and then, in 1971, with a production of Trevor Griffith’s Occupations, about the 1920 occupation of a Fiat factory by workers in Turin. Goodbody remained, however, more interested in Shakespeare than contemporary plays, and, in 1973, she directed As You Like It on Stratford’s main stage. This experience convinced her that the proscenium theatre was not her milieu, and, in December 1973, she sent a memorandum to the RSC management arguing for a second stage in Stratford for experimental productions, junior artists, new plays, and community engagement: ‘a first step towards ending the economic and social barrier between the RSC and the society that partly finances it’. The 140-seat Other Place, with Goodbody as its director, opened in 1974 with her production of King Lear. With only nine actors, Goodbody focussed primarily on the politics of familial and sexual relationships in the play, and used the Fool as a commentator, speaking directly to the audience in the popular tradition. This simplicity and direct audience engagement was retained by Goodbody in her 1975 Hamlet, a gripping and witty production, grounded in the skills of its ensemble and a rehearsal process that engaged them actively in its creation. Goodbody died by suicide before she could witness the production’s huge success, or that of The Other Place in the years that followed. She might not have been surprised to discover, however, that she remains the only woman to have directed Shakespeare’s most famous play at the RSC.
