It’s not just because we’ve already had the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards (plus the South Bank Show Awards and, in this reality TV era where the public is forever being invited to make its own choices, Whatsonstage.com’s increasingly high-profile Theatregoers’ Choice Awards) that the Oliviers have a déjà vu feeling about them. But also, by coming last and so late in the day, all but two productions to receive awards last night have long closed. Even many of the entertainments that interspersed the awards last night were from shows that had already shuttered: we got performances from the casts of Little Shop of Horrors, Parade and Fiddler on the Roof, plus Hairspray and The Magic Flute (the only two shows still running to get awards) and The Lord of the Rings.
That’s no problem, of course, in terms of celebrating and remembering theatrical excellence; but unlike, say, New York’s Tony Awards, which have a crucial commercial imperative, there is little value to them here in those terms. And also, of course, though the awards are meant to reflect the diversity and appeal of London theatre, they routinely manage to show mostly how head and shoulders above the rest the subsidised theatre is: not just that seven out of 19 theatre awards went to the National Theatre, but the rest of the tally saw productions and personnel at the Royal Court taking two, the Barbican two, the Donmar Warehouse one, and productions that came to the West End via Chichester and the Young Vic three more — all of which left the commercial West End itself winning just four awards, all of them for Hairspray.
As always, there are inevitable losers at awards ceremonies – by definition, more have to lose than win – but the Donmar notched up more losses than anyone else, since it was second only to the National in terms of the number of nominations it had received: 13, seven of them for Parade which went home empty handed, and four for Othello, the latter of which secured the Donmar’s sole win, for Chiwetel Ejiofor as Best Actor for Othello.
That last one, of course, upset the winning streak of Patrick Stewart, whose performance as Macbeth had won him awards in both the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle gongs (sharing the latter one with Chiwey for Best Shakespearean Performance). Even Stewart’s director, Rupert Goold, failed to mention him in his thank you’s when collecting his own gong for Best Director of that production, though he paid tribute to Jonathan Church (who gave him his first professional directing job ten years ago, and under whose Chichester watch this production was originally done), and his wife, Kate Fleetwood, who played Lady M. But there has also been remarkable synergy between the three main awards in the Best New Play and Best New Musical stakes, which saw A Disappearing Number and Hairspray respectively taking the triple threat.
The Oliviers also, of course, traditionally produce some interesting clashes and anomalies: Rafta, Rafta, based on a very old English comedy by Bill Naughton, won out over genuinely new comedies to take the Best New Comedy Award; and putting Broadway’s Rob Ashford and Jack O’Brien, for productions of the musicals Parade and Hairspray respectively into the same category for Best Director with War Horse’s Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris and Macbeth’s Rupert Goold (who actually won) is like throwing apples and oranges into the same cart and expecting no one to notice the difference in taste. Again, welcome though it was to have a panto nominated at all – Stratford East’s Cinderella — the weird catch-all category it found itself, for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre, meant that it went head-to-head with the Young Vic’s studio production of The Brothers Size and the Royal Court Upstairs productions of Gone Too Far and That Face. (Gone Too Far, which took the award and is returning to the Royal Court this summer, was produced in association with ATC, whose director Bijan Sheibani is obviously the one to watch: he also did The Brothers Size).
But what exactly is an affiliate theatre anyway? The Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs and the Young Vic studios count as affiliates – but the Royal Court’s main house Downstairs and the Young Vic’s main house, as well as the Almeida, are now full members of SOLT, making their productions eligible for consideration in the main categories. Apparently you pay your dues, in every sense, and you take your chances: they have put themselves forward for consideration in this way, and pay a higher premium to do so. But it’s one more way in which the Awards have come to be dominated by the subsidised sector, too.
As ever, acceptance speeches sometimes went on forever – it might have shortened things if a blanket thank you was issued to Nick Hytner and Michael Grandage, whom more people cited in their speeches than anyone else – but it was very generous of Tracie Bennett, collecting her award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical, to publicly wish to share it with Parade’s Shaun Escoffery. On a personal note, I was pleased that my friend Howard Harrison – whom I’ve known for more than twenty years, since he was a production administrator at Cameron Mackintosh Ltd but did occasional lighting design on the side (while I was working at the ad agency Dewynters plc, and doing occasional journalism on the side), finally won an Olivier for his lighting design of Macbeth — his eighth Olivier nomination but his first win.
And amidst the social throng that these awards also represent, it was lovely to see Stratford East’s archivist Murray Melvin at the next table – who told me that the last time he’d been to Grosvenor House was forty years ago when he came to the BAFTAs there: he was up for an award for the film version of A Taste of Honey but lost. He went on to win the Cannes Award instead – but then spent the next 18 months down at the Labour Exchange as he was out-of-work. That’s the actor’s life for you – and in a nutshell, just how meaningless awards can be!
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