A performance of Petty Men, a play based on Julius Caesar in which two understudies try to outperform the actual show – heard intermittently on an intercom – was staged on Wednesday (November 26) by Buzz Studios, founded by her nephew Adam.
This was followed by a discussion, chaired by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford Univerity, and featuring Sir Trevor Nunn, a colleague and friend of Buzz and former RSC artistic director, and Tamara Harvey, the current co-artistic director at the RSC.
The conversation centred on the life, achievements and legacy of Buzz, who killed herself in her house in Highbury, just after directing Ben Kingsley in Hamlet.
Sir Trevor spoke of the influence of Buzz on the RSC, founding The Other Place, converting a tin shack in Stratford-on-Avon to a space where small but intense productions could be staged, alongside the major productions at the main theatre. He explained that he had encouraged Buzz in the enterprise because he felt the RSC was missing out on not having a small location for drama, something which had become popular in London and other parts of the country in the early 1970s.
He also spoke of her left wing political engagement, some of her views with which he agreed and some with which he disputed.
“She was fiercely political,” he recalled. “We’d have discussions about pure Marxism and how everything had gone when it became communism and dictatorship”.
He said that he had never understood what led to her decision to kill herself when her career at the age of 28 was booming. It is believed she might well have become the first female to be the RSC’s artistic director.
Instead Tamara Harvey, who has now achieved a joint role at the company, spoke of Buzz’s influence. She said:”If we ever feel we are being safe, it is as if Buzz is always there to remind us not to be.”
Her manifesto for the theatre is that it should be accessible to all strata of society, be affordable and have a simplicity of staging.
This is what Buzz Studios has taken up and Petty Men at the Arcola has exemplified. In the play featuring a two-person cast, Adam Goodbody, who lives in Kentish Town, and John Chisham play the understudies of Cassius and Brutus respectively.
They, together with the director Julia Levai, wrote the play about the interaction of the two understudies of the two chief assassins of Julius Caesar as they wait for the possibility of acting on the real stage if one of the principal actors becomes indisposed.
The fact that they can hear the actual production is going ahead indicates that not only has another opportunity been lost in the furtherance of their careers but they are once again being left behind. Under the strain of this realisation their relationship collapses.
The play on November 26 was before a virtually sold-out audience. It continues at the Arcola until Sunday, December 21.
