Exhibit honours Buzz Goodbody, the first female director of the Royal Shakespeare Company

Mary-Ann Goodbody, nicknamed Buzz because as a child she was buzzing with energy, joined the RSC in 1967, and helped to establish alternative studio theatre venue The Other Place in Stratford in 1974.

A year later she directed Ben Kingsley in Hamlet, prompting a review in The Times that it was “an astounding revelation of the most excavated play in the world, ranking with Peter Brooks’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the key classical production of the decade”.

A few days after the production opened on April 8, 1975, she killed herself at the age of 28.

The “young and militant lady director” was a pupil at Roedean, near Brighton, where she became a communist, and later studied English at the newly founded Sussex University, where she attempted suicide.

Her suicide note read: “I am a tortoise without a shell”, and afterwards one theatre critic said it “robbed the theatre of one of its most promising directors”.

The exhibition, marking the 40th anniversary of The Other Place, which closed in 1989, runs until July 12.

Visit rsc.org.uk for more details