Buzz Goodbody

Mary Ann "Buzz" Goodbody (25 June 1946 – 12 April 1975) was an English theatre director. Associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company for almost all of her short career, Goodbody is remembered for her sometimes politically charged experimental work, for establishing the RSC's first studio theatre in Stratford, The Other Place, and as the RSC's first female director.

Raised in St John's Wood and Hampstead, London, Goodbody gained her nickname as a toddler as a consequence of her very active and curious inclinations. Her father was a barrister who spent a considerable amount of time in Africa and the Far East, with the result that Goodbody and her brother were largely brought up by their mother and nanny.

Goodbody was educated at Roedean and the newly founded Sussex University. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from the age of 15, according to her brother, she was very much against applying for a place at Oxford or Cambridge.

Acting in university student productions was frustrating for her. She once noted "All the best roles"—those she found interesting such as the lead in Henry V—"are written for blokes"; this was the catalyst that led her towards directing plays as a career.

While at Sussex, where the main component of her degree was English Literature, she adapted and staged Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground as part of her Honours Thesis. This production won an award at the National Student Drama Festival, and eventually transferred to the West End.Sunday Times columnist Hunter Davies, who interviewed Goodbody in 1966, "found her so fascinating, remarkable, outspoken, opinionated — someone who seemed to sum up the spirit of our new universities, if not the 1960s — that [he] decided to put her in a [never-completed] book". In September 1967 she married Edward Buscome, a University of Sussex film student; the marriage ended in divorce.

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