Curtain up: marvellous portraits from the 64th Evening Standard Theatre Awards

A very warm welcome to the special Evening Standard Theatre Awards edition of ES Magazine. Once again, I write this letter in the morning afterglow cast by a spectacular night at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Returning to that hallowed, gorgeous theatre as stage host after dazzling us with her wit, wisdom and creative profanity 12 months ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge observed that London theatre ‘has had a banger of a year for diversity’ as the event began. She was right about that. By its end, we had revelled in the most glorious celebration of inclusion in the history of these, if not any, major awards.

Best Play went to The Inheritance, Matthew Lopez’s six-hour exploration of gay love and relationships after the Aids crisis in New York. Inevitably and rightly, the judges gave Best Musical to Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s riotously inventive translation of the birth of American democracy into rap and hip-hop, performed by a diverse cast. One of its members, Jamael Westman, spoke for other winners when he touchingly began his Emerging Talent Award acceptance speech with an almost disbelieving, ‘When I think where I have emerged from…’

Elsewhere Ralph Fiennes beat a mighty field including Sir Ian McKellen and Bryan Cranston to win Best Actor for playing Antony opposite Sophie Okonedo’s asp-clutching Cleopatra in one of the stage’s greatest romances. And Sir Cameron Mackintosh was a richly deserving recipient of the Lebedev Award for his incalculable contribution to musical theatre. Otherwise the night was dominated by women, and artists of colour. Marianne Elliott took Best Director for her sparkling revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and Natasha Gordon won the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright for Nine Night, an examination of conflict between the generations of an immigrant family from Jamaica, lent fierce relevance by the Windrush fiasco.

If drama has ambitions beyond entertaining and making us think and feel, and even the provision of what mischievous Phoebe identified as ‘a very expensive nap’, it must mirror the rich variety of the society that incubates and inspires it. The most vibrant city on Earth can be incredibly proud of how its stage has delivered on that over the past year. The Evening Standard is incredibly proud to acknowledge it, and thank you to our sponsors for helping make the event happen. We recognise all of you on our winners page.

In one of her less ironic flourishes, Phoebe pointed out that while the country depressingly appears in some ways to be going backwards, the capital’s theatre is storming in the opposite direction. However the current political turmoil is resolved, it will never go backwards from here.

Sixty-three years after the paper’s then deputy editor, Charles Wintour, founded the Theatre Awards, his granddaughter Bee Carrozzini, daughter of my friend and co-host, Dame Anna, recounted with fondness her weekly theatre trips in New York as a teenager. Along with my other co-hosts, the world-conquering Claire Foy and Idris Elba, bearing his recent anointment as Sexiest Man Alive with typical stocisim, Bee presented the Most Promising Playwright award. And it was a delight that the timelessly great Vanessa Redgrave, a student at the Central School of Speech & Drama in 1955, gave the Best Actress prize named after her late daughter, Natasha Richardson.

But along with such comforting signs of continuity, this more than anything was a night dedicated to electrifying change. In my letter a year ago, I singled out Arinzé Kene’s exquisite rendition of ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, Sam Cooke’s heart-rendingly optimistic civil rights ballad from 1964. It took far too long, but infinitely better late than never — change has come to London’s theatre. It is and will continue to be immeasurably the stronger for that.