Elyse Dodgson
Elyse Dodgson (1945 – 23 October 2018) MBE was an English theatre producer. In 1996 she co-founded the International Department at the Royal Court Theatre and ran this for over 20 years. In this time she worked with playwrights and coordinated play development projects in more than 70 countries. According to April De Angelis, Dodgson was "responsible for thousands of new plays written in voices that may otherwise have remained silent." Career Dodgson moved to Britain in 1968, joining the Brighton Combination, a radical underground theatre company. After starting a family, she became a teacher and worked as head of drama at Vauxhall Manor, a girls’ comprehensive in South London. Here she developed a pioneering approach to developing plays by starting with personal testimony of historical events. Several of these plays were produced at the Oval House Theatre, including the influential Motherland in 1982, about women in the Windrush generation, which was based on interviews with many of the pupil's mothers on their experience migrating from the West Indies to Britain. Dodgson then used this last play as the basis of an influential textbook for Secondary Schools. Royal Court Young People's Theatre Dodgson was hired in 1985 by Max Stafford-Clark