Plays

Cockpit Theatre, London, 1966; National Theatre of Craiova, Romania, 2004.

A woman calls a builder to fix a damp patch in her childhood nursery. He fixes it and then, finding deeper rot beneath the surface, proceeds to dismantle the entire house. First staged at the Cockpit Theatre in 1966, the play was revived nearly four decades later at the National Theatre of Craiova, Romania, where it was received as if it had been written yesterday.

Cockpit Theatre, London, 1966

A sharp, comic piece staged at the Cockpit Theatre in 1966. One More Bull deploys comedy as its primary instrument, with an eye for the absurdities of institutional behavior that would run through his writing for decades.

Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2006; Bulandra Theatre, Bucharest, 2007

A meditation on utopia, disappointment, and the gap between the futures we imagine and the ones we actually inhabit. Staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006 and subsequently at the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest, one of Romania’s great theatrical institutions, the play reflects Elsom’s long engagement with Eastern European culture and his understanding of what the collapse of ideological certainty feels like from the inside.

Tristan Bates Theatre, London, 2009

Produced by Anthony Field Associates at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London’s West End, Old Boy is a two-hander about memory, friendship, and the unexpected revisitations of the past. Compact and precisely written, it demonstrates John’s gift for finding large themes in small encounters.

International Festival of Musical Theatre, Bucharest, 2007; London, 2011

A musical with music by composer Wayne Warlow. A divorced London lawyer arranges what she intends to be a strictly professional relationship with a Romanian handyman on a work permit. The arrangement, inevitably, becomes something else. Set against the backdrop of European expansion in the early 2000s, the show moves between comedy and heartbreak, using its songs to give voice to what neither character can quite bring themselves to say.