A view from the past

To look back over this paper’s 60 years of prize-giving for excellence in theatre is to witness an ongoing celebration of something this city does particularly well. ‘We don’t stand high in the world,’ Peter Hall, himself no stranger to these Awards, once famously remarked at a press lunch, ‘[but] we stand high in the arts.’ However much one might quibble with the first half of that sentence, this venerable director’s assertion of excellence across the cultural spectrum remains unassailably true, and the roll call of Evening Standard Theatre Awards recipients across the decades stands as a testimonial to that fact.

The ceremony itself has come a long way from inevitably more humble origins dating back to a time well before Anna Wintour was among those greeting arrivals to the event, as has been the case over the past few years. In fact, we have the fashion world icon’s father, erstwhile Evening Standard editor the late Charles Wintour, to thank for the existence of the Awards in the first place, the Standard steal-ing a march on both the Critics’ Circle and the Olivier Awards when it comes to fêting the London stage. The award for Most Promising Playwright was renamed in his honour in 2000.

A consideration of six decades of winners acts both as a marker of the health of the capital’s theatre at a specific point in time and as an exercise in prescience or even prophecy. Who knew, for instance, that the very first year (1955) would find a curious category called Most Controversial Play, the winner being none other than an absurdist vaudeville,

Waiting for Godot, that long ago entered the canon; its director, incidentally, was Peter Hall. The next year found both top acting prizes going to beloved theatre names — Paul Scofield and Peggy Ashcroft — who would go on to win Oscars (for A Man for All Seasons and A Passage to India respectively). Evening Standard, then as now, acted as a bellwether for ever-ascendant talent. In the past ten years or so it has awarded Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hardy and Andrew Garfield with the Milton Shulman Outstanding Newcomer awards and this trio have gone on to wow Hollywood in big-budget blockbusters, playing superheroes and nemeses, as well as in starring roles on the Broadway stage.

Pick almost any actor, writer or director whose career has shown any scale or breadth and his or her career can — on one level, at least — be mapped out in relation to these Awards. Co-winner of the 1970 prize for Most Promising Playwright for his play Slag, David Hare then wrote the play Plenty, which brought the great Kate Nelligan (a talent sadly absent of late from the London and New York stage) the 1978 prize for Best Actress, just as the recent remounting of Hare’s subsequent Skylight was named 2014’s Revival of the Year.

Early years of the prize found certain playwrights named almost in perpetual rotation — Peter Nichols, Christopher Hampton, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn — and it’s intriguing to note the extent to which they are often placed in different categories, Stoppard winning Best Comedy in 1974 for Travesties, having two years previously won the Best Play prize for the scarcely less comic Jumpers. That sort of hair-splitting division — still prevalent at Hollywood’s Golden Globes, which separates comedies and dramas into different categories — has thankfully been abandoned by the Standard. For that, one has to give at least partial credit to Yasmina Reza, who memorably quipped in 1996 that she was bemused to have won a comedy award for her long-running play Art having thought, she deadpanned before those in attendance, ‘that I’d written a tragedy’.

Evening Standard has always looked beyond British borders. Broadway’s The Pajama Game (revived in the West End last summer) took the first-ever prize for Best Musical, in 1955; the same year that Frenchman Jean Giraudoux collared the Best New Play trophy for Tiger at the Gates. But what’s heartening in the years since is the sense of an ever-widening array of winners across the board. Scan the Best Actress list, for instance, in times past and you find a veritable relay race of the trophy being passed between multiple dames (Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Diana Rigg) — with Vanessa Redgrave rounding out a seemingly inviolate quintet.

How refreshing, then, in 2003 to find that category won by the comparatively little-known Sandy McDade for a play, Iron, from the pen of this year’s Best Play victor Rona Munro (The James Plays). The 2002 Milton Shulman Outstanding Newcomer prize went to a relatively untested young American actor by the name of Jake Gyllenhaal, his London stage debut as the endearingly gawky pothead in This Is Our Youth at the Garrick Theatre just one of many celebrated performances enshrined in the Evening Standard Awards’ collective memory. The Newcomer prize has long constituted its own very particular crystal ball, Chiwetel Ejiofor landing it for Blue/Orange at the Cottesloe Theatre some 13 years before he would storm Hollywood in 12 Years A Slave, just as Rufus Norris’ 2001 trophy for the direction of Afore Night Come can now be seen to hint at Norris’ imminent occupancy of the artistic directorship of the National Theatre.

What of the ceremony itself? In 30 years’ attendance at the Awards, I’ve watched the gong-giving evolve from an annual lunchtime knees-up at The Savoy compered by the inimitable Ned Sherrin — the Evening Standard Awards’ equivalent to the Oscars’ Bob Hope — to this year’s star-packed dinner at the

Palladium, where I all but collided with David Beckham coming out of the loo. At the same time, presenters in the post-Sherrin era have ranged from Damian Lewis to last month’s Rob Brydon/Steve Coogan double act, though I reserve a special affection for that rare woman to be granted hosting duties — Dame Edna Everage in 2011. Nor, away from the podium, shall I soon forget a drunken Martin McDonagh in 1996 being upbraided for bad behaviour, following his win for Most Promising Playwright for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, by none other than table-mate Sean Connery. Minutes later, McDonagh exited proceedings, trophy in hand, only to be seen weaving his way defiantly among the afternoon traffic on the Strand.

There have been joint winners (Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch in 2011 for Frankenstein) and one-offs (a special prize to Nicole Kidman in 1998, essentially for generating headlines beyond all proportion in The Blue Room), some names all but forgotten (I haven’t heard of Gwyn Thomas, co-winner of the 1961 Most Promising Playwright prize for The Keep, since) and others who remain very much with us (the indefatigable Trevor Nunn, who won the very first directing award in 1979 and then again, shared with John Caird, the next year). What will the next 60 years hold? That’s anyone’s guess but let’s just hope that London theatre is still here to enlarge and enlighten our world and that these Awards continue to honour that shivery sense of discovery that awaits us every time the lights go down and the curtain comes up. ES

Matt Wolf is London theatre critic of the International New York Times. He attended his first Evening Standard Theatre Awards in 1984