Libretti

ADC Theatre, Cambridge – 1956

Written and directed by John Elsom during his time at Cambridge, Peacemaker was performed at the ADC Theatre, one of Britain’s oldest university theatre companies and reviewed in The Times. An early indication of the qualities that would mark his later work: the integration of words, music, and movement as equally weighted dramatic elements, and a refusal to treat theatrical form as merely incidental to content.

Opera libretto for composer Barry Anderson, 1958

Written for the New Zealand composer Barry Anderson, Maui draws on Polynesian mythology to explore themes of creativity, transgression, and the relationship between human ambition and natural order. The eponymous figure of Maui, the trickster demigod of Pacific legend who fished up islands from the ocean floor and attempted to win immortality for humanity provides Elsom with a rich dramatic subject: the over-reacher whose gifts and daring cannot ultimately save him.

Unteatru, Bucharest – 2011

Staged at Unteatru in Bucharest in 2011, The Turning World is John’s most recent libretto and reflects his long creative relationship with Romanian theatre. The work engages with the experience of historical transformation, the sense of living through a turning point whose significance can only be understood in retrospect and brings together the political and the personal in a form that requires both word and music to carry its full weight.