It’s that time of year again: everyone is making lists of their best (and worst) of the year, and while The Guardian was intent on stealing a march on everyone else by publishing their critics’ top picks for 2007 as early as December 11 as I blogged here, most have sensibly left it till rather later. I’ve got one running in the Sunday Express this weekend, but have elsewhere chosen my personal top five here.
Also last week I hosted the annual discussion on theatevoice.com, in which a group of critics that featured the Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett, Time Out’s Jane Edwardes, Variety’s David Benedict and myself gave our personal roll-calls of honour. I’m always struck on such occasions by both the universality of some choices – we all chose War Horse, for instance, for a category I designated as “best creative contribution”, while both David and I chose Mark Rylance from Boeing-Boeing for Best Perforformance, both Kate ande Jane chose Tom Hiddleston (who played Cassio in the Donmar Othello and was also featured in Cheek by Jowl’s Cymbeline) for Newcomer of the Year, and both David and Kate chose Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby, as their best new play.
I managed to miss the latter as I was in Australia when it opened at Hampstead, and it’s another fact of life that you can’t see everything. But it’s always disappointing at this time of year when you realise that, despite going to the theatre virtually every single night of the year in pursuit of that kind of excellence, you miss some of the acknowledged highlights; I also missed David Benedict’s nomination for newcomer of the year, Anupama Chandrasekhar for a play Free Outgoing that was seen briefly at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs. In a Guardian blog, Matt Wolf gave it his vote for play of the year, too.
But these are all fleeting, subjective opinions of a year that has now nearly gone, and it’s impossible to be comprehensive: in choosing five productions of the year, as I did for one column, I had to leave out at least five more (I’d have liked to included the Menier’s Dealer’s Choice, Boeing-Boeing, Hairspray, Parade and The Arsonists. And I’d probably have five more if I could beyond that….)
Never mind five or fifteen – a similar difficulty even attends drawing up a list of one hundred. The Stage’s annual survey of the hundred most influential people currently working in UK theatre announced its Top 20 here yesterday and this week’s paper, due out today, lists the other 80 (but doesn’t try to rank them). Since ours is the only trade paper for the performing arts and entertainment industry in the UK (and this website is the UK’s most popular web-based performing arts publication, according to the quarterly charts published by Hitwise, with 365,000 unique visitors monthly), this is both an authoritative and informed list, based on a professional poll of Stage staffers, contributors and readers (whose opinions were solicited online), and involving a great deal of discussion that I was part of.
Even so, we have made forced to make reluctant omissions; there just isn’t space in a hundred names to include all the movers and shakers who make British theatre move and shake. But the final list does offer an ongoing pointer to the constantly shifting tectonic plates and patterns of the theatrical ecology. David Ian, for instance, is knocked off to the top perch that he secured two years ago and then held again, jointly with Andrew Lloyd Webber, last year, to drop to 7th position, a reflection of the fluidity of the corporate theatre producing model that secured him his position in the first place as Live Nation, whose global theatrical division he has been in charge of, is in the process of being sold, and he no longer even works from their offices anymore but has now set himself up as an independent producer once again to manage his and Paul Nicholas’s joint producing revival of Grease.
Cameron Mckintosh moves back into the pole position he has previously occupied three times before – knocking long-time professional partner and rival Andrew Lloyd Webber to second – which accurately reflects both the large personal investments he is making into the theatres he owns (and this year saw the Gielgud newly refurbished), but also his expanding global reach that will see him move into China next.
It’s a striking fact that the top twenty is still dominated by men – only four women feature on it, two of them in joint nominations with men — and not a single minority name, either. But things are subtly changing elsewhere, with actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Paterson Joseph and writers Kwame Kwei-Armah and Ayub Khan-Din and making the list of the year’s most influential practitioners in their fields. Women directors have been making tracks for years and are now nearly equal in number to the men, where its good to welcome to the Top 100 ranks the likes of Kneehigh’s Emma Rice, fast-rising Sacha Wares and panto expert Susie McKenna, as well as Marianne Elliott and Katie Mitchell. Also, amongst an increasing band of women taking the artistic reigns of regional and fringe theatres, Erica Whyman, Gemma Bodinetz, Rachel Kavenaugh and Josie Rourke claim their places on the list.
But in the commercial theatre it is producers who matter more than anyone else, and while the Top 20 list includes eight of them (plus Sally Greene who shares a nomination with Kevin Spacey for running the Old Vic but who also of course produces for Old Vic Productions), its especially welcome to find younger names on the list elsewhere, from West Enders Matthew Byam Shaw and Edward Snape to touring producers Kenny Wax and Michael Harrison; as well as new arrivals like Australia’s Jacobsen Entertainment and the re-emergence of veteran duo Duncan C Weldon and Paul Elliott to major prominence.
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