We’ve already had the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and there are the Oliviers still to come, but in between there’s the annual, far more informally presented Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, for which a refreshingly low-tech ceremony was held in the best bar of any West End theatre, the downstairs room at the Prince of Wales, and hosted by the Chairman of the Drama Section of the circle, Charles Spencer.
This was a chance for the critics to take to the stage for once, and allow the actors to put a public face on those they usually face on the other side of the footlights. I always worry on these occasions what an eccentric bunch we must seem, a suspicion confirmed when Charlie couldn’t locate his glasses as he took to the stage to introduce the event – but subsequently confessed that they’d been around his neck, hidden by his tie, all along!
Then it was the turn of The Stage’s own sometime advice guru Arthur Smith, who can always be guaranteed to remove any lingering suggestion of pomposity to the occasion, and this year suggested a couple of new categories of his own, including the Nicholas de Jongh Award for Best Aisle in a Theatre. “He doesn’t review the plays anymore, he reviews the aisles,” joked Arthur playfully. He also referred several times to Nick Hytner’s now infamous declaration that the critics were “Dead White Males” – and wondered aloud therefore if Hytner was himself a young African-Caribbean. He later, however, endorsed the suggestion that we are dead white males: “Who else could endure Dirty Dancing?”
What’s particularly pleasurable about these awards is something that Patrick Stewart noted in his acceptance speech for Best Shakespearean Performance (an award he tied for with Othello’s Chiwetel Ejiofor): “I didn’t expect this to be so much fun”. But Stewart also movingly spoke of the rush of happiness he has experienced over the last few days from seeing, in quick succession, Fiddler on the Roof, The Sea and Othello.
I got my own rush of happiness when Anne-Marie Duff, accepting her award for Best Actress for her performance in St Joan, paid particular tribute to the distinguished woman sitting in the front row: “No one warned me that Lady Olivier would be here – blimey!”, she exclaimed. Except that it wasn’t Joan Plowright at all, but the indefatigable Blanche Marvin, who is regularly mistaken for her!
As well as the two categories I’ve just mentioned, there were also awards in seven more – and although I didn’t know who had won what before I got there, I ruined all possible suspense I might have had when, in idle moment during Nicholas de Jongh’s speech (and there many idle moments elsewhere during the afternoon, with several presenters re-visiting their reviews rather than just giving the awards), I downloaded my e-mail to my mobile phone, and found that a press release was already waiting for me with all the winners in it!
But what I also knew before I even saw it is that my own personal votes this year stood virtually no chance of winning. The way these awards work is that there is no discussion (or, as Charlie put it, “horse trading”) – merely a collection of individual votes in each category that are then tallied, with the ones who get the most individual mentions coming out of top. This means, of course, that it is entirely possible that if, say, 40 critics vote, and 38 of them vote for separate people and just two for the same one, that one could emerge the victor.
So although they didn’t win, I am proud of some of my more idiosyncratic nominations, such as Michelle Gomez for Best Actress (for the most indelibly funny performance I’ve seen on a stage in years when she appeared in Boeing-Boeing), or Neil Bartlett for Best Director (for his incredibly moving production of The Pianist at the Manchester International Festival).
Rather absurdly, the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards clashed yesterday with another high-profile awards ceremony when The South Bank Show chose to hold theirs on the same day. It resulted in a mad dash across town to the Dorchester Hotel for some, like Anne-Marie Duff who went on to the South Bank Show to collect the theatre prize there on behalf of the production of St Joan.
I made my own mad dash after the Awards in another direction entirely: I went straight to Heathrow to catch the 6pm flight to New York, which is where I am writing this now at half past midnight local time – just as London is waking up again, but I have not gone to bed yet! Luckily, the plane was virtually empty – there was just six people in the economy cabin that I was in; I have not flown in a plane this sparsely populated since a trip I took to New York two weeks after 9/11. So I managed to get a bit of rest of the plane – and then I was able to speed into town, too. After clearing immigration in record time and collecting my case, I was in a cab less than 30 minutes after landing, and in the apartment I am staying in here, near Times Square, less than 30 minutes after that. An hour from plane door to front door: imagine being able to do that in London! My hosts weren’t home yet – so I dropped my bags, and took the dog for a walk. I felt like a local already.
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