The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (Griffin) ★★★★★

Written by steve j spears. Griffin Theatre Company. Belvoir Downstairs Theatre. 21 Feb – 29 Mar, 2026

This is Simon Burke’s show — we’re just lucky to be able to buy a ticket.

The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin is fifty years old this year, and Griffin Theatre’s anniversary production — directed by Declan Greene and staged at Belvoir’s intimate Downstairs Theatre — makes a compelling case that steve j. spears’ tragicomedy has only grown more urgent with age. In 1976, it scandalised audiences at the Nimrod (the forefather to both Griffin and Belvoir). Half a century on, it’s still wickedly sharp.

It arrived in good company. The mid-seventies was a remarkable moment for queer visibility — Rocky Horror had just hit cinemas, La Cage aux Folles was packing out theatres in Paris, and play & film of The Boys in the Band were in recent memory. Where those works leaned into camp and spectacle, spears went the other way entirely — quiet, domestic, devastating. Harvey Fierstein would later mine similar territory with Casa Valentina (2014), a Tony-nominated ensemble piece about heterosexual cross-dressers stealing a weekend of freedom in the Catskills — but spears got there first, and did it in one room, with one man.

Speech and drama teacher Robert O’Brien (Simon Burke) has a secret. Behind his fusty, professorial appearance is a gay man who loves to dress in women’s clothing and dreams of intimate moments with Mick Jagger — a side of himself he must keep well hidden from the conservative clients who visit his Double Bay home. This is the 1970s: being gay is illegal, and cross-dressing is even more dangerous. When Mrs Franklin brings her twelve-year-old son Benjamin for help with a stutter, Robert sees a natural performer. But as Robert takes a professional interest in Benjamin, Benjamin is taking quite a different kind of interest in the much older man.

This is a one-hander, and the synergy between Burke as a performer and the text is extraordinary. His years on Play School have set him up well — his affinity for voices is put to remarkable use as he populates the stage with an entire world of invisible characters: neighbours, students, a best friend, a psychiatrist. He moves from high camp to quiet devastation without a single false note, finding in O’Brien a man of warmth, sharp wit, and bittersweet dignity. It is easily the best single performance of the year so far, and a strong awards contender.

From the opening — Burke frolicking naked around his flat (yes, this is my second gay play in two days featuring full frontal nudity; there’s something in the water) — it’s clear that dressing in a jacket and tie for his students is itself a form of drag, and that his truest self emerges in private, in a simple housecoat and head wrap.
It is in this duality, and the fear it creates, that the play builds its tension. Greene’s direction is laced throughout with an illicit sense of danger, masked by humour, that quietly tightens as the play progresses. For O’Brien the greatest peril is an open curtain or a knock at the door. He can never fully relax when the world is watching.

The production around him is equally rich. Isabel Hudson’s design layers nostalgia and unease with real intelligence. The sound design by David Bergman gives the space texture without ever drawing attention to itself. Brockman’s lighting is subtle until it isn’t. Greene trusts the material completely, adding moments of finesse — some nicely underplayed magic tricks — that are pure theatre.

Watching The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin alongside The Normal Heart and Afterglow — an inadvertent triptych spanning the 1970s, 80s, and 2010s currently on our stages — is a fascinating measure of how far gay rights have travelled, and how quickly that progress can be threatened. Today it is trans and gender-diverse people who bear the sharpest edge of that backlash — their visibility hard-won, their rights newly contested. O’Brien isn’t transgender, but in a world that policed gender expression with psychiatric institutions and criminal law, his hidden life speaks to that experience. It’s a sharp reminder of where we came from, and the damage it wrought.

This is a great play with a knockout performance at its core. Grab one of the very few remaining tickets while you can.