My friend Bernard Pomerance, who has died aged 76, was a playwright and poet whose most famous work was the play The Elephant Man. It had its first run in Britain in 1977, then went over to New York and returned to the UK to be put on at the National Theatre.
I got to know Bernard when he moved from his native US to London in the late 1960s and, together with the director Roland Rees, we formed, in 1971, the Foco Novo theatre company. It produced, among other works, The Elephant Man, which told the true story of an Englishman, Joseph Merrick (referred to in the play as John Merrick), who was born with gross deformities and spent his early life in freak shows before becoming a darling of Victorian society.
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