Elyse Dodgson was international director at the Royal Court Theatre for more than 20 years. She introduced theatre from around the world to the British audience. Her father Sam Kramer was born Solomon Rosenrauch and emigrated from the Ukraine to the United States, where Elyse was born to his wife Millie in 1945. Dodgson studied drama at the Northwestern University in Chicago and later moved to Britain, joining the Brighton Combination, a radical underground theatre company. She worked as head of drama at a girls’ comprehensive in South London and impressed Max Stafford-Clark with a verbatim play performed by her students. She joined the artistic team of the Royal Court Theatre in 1985 as director of the Young People’s Theatre and then worked as international director from 1996. Dodgson produced the Royal Court Young Writers’ Festival, which ran from 1986 to 1991. Throughout her career, she worked with playwrights in more than 70 countries. In the last two decades, she coordinated play development projects in Brazil, China, Ukraine, Syria, South Africa, and many more countries.

In 2004, she received the Young Vic Award and was made an MBE for services to international theatre and young writers overseas in 2010. Elyse Dodgson died in October 2018.