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Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2019: The judges explain how they chose the winners

Dave Benett/Getty Images
Dave Benett/Getty Images

From Andrew Scott’s glorious comic turn to Dame Maggie Smith’s haunting portrayal of a Nazi worker in denial – our judges reveal why the winners stood out at the 65th Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

Best Actor, in partnership with Ambassador Theatre Group

Andrew Scott, Present LaughterOld Vic

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

People may remember 2019 as the year Andrew Scott got the nation distinctly hot under the collar as the Hot Priest in Fleabag — but he also gave a stage performance that became the hottest ticket in town. Playing Garry Essendine, a gloriously egotistical and petulant actor, in Noël Coward’s 1939 play Present Laughter, Scott once more proved a captivatingly changeable actor onstage. This was a dazzling performance, Scott skimming wit, charm, and scorn like so many stones across the surface. But what marked it out as great was how he found the deep undertow of insecurity and doubt beneath. Both a complex, sensitive portrayal, and an effortless joy to behold.

See ntlive.nationaltheatre.org for future cinema screenings of the show

Holly Williams

Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress, in partnership with Christian Louboutin

Maggie Smith, A German LifeBridge Theatre

(Dave Benett/Getty Images)
(Dave Benett/Getty Images)

How many stars, returning to the stage aged 84, after a 12-year absence, would opt for a 100-minute solo show? Maggie Smith combined guts and impeccable technique to win a fifth Best Actress trophy, 57 years after the first. In a true-life tale, she played Brunhilde Pomsel, a Jewish woman who worked for Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels but who, even when interviewed at 102 (Smith gamely aged up for the part), denied hypocrisy or guilt. In an script elegantly derived by Christopher Hampton from a documentary, Smith showed us someone desperately struggling not to remember her life. The eventual reluctant whispered admission: “We didn’t want to know,” had a showstopping horror.

Mark Lawson

Best Play, in partnership with Chanel

Sweat by Lynn Nottage, Donmar Warehouse & Gielgud Theatre

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

From an impressively close-fought field, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat emerged as clear favourite for Best Play. A study of the corrosive effects of poverty, set in a single-industry American town but inspired by Nottage’s experience in Mansfield during the miners’ strike in 1984, it provided three rare strong working-class roles for older women. It has drama, humour and pathos and demonstrated the economic roots of racism and resentment of immigrants. A terrific piece of work.

Nick Curtis

Milton Shulman Award for Best Director

Robert Icke, The Doctor & The Wild Duck, Almeida Theatre

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

Robert Icke doesn’t direct plays so much as mould them to his will, creating his own translations and adaptations, unpicking them with dazzling precision and altering the way we see them. He is the most original and exciting director in Britain today, attracting new audiences to classic works. In stripping Ibsen’s The Wild Duck bare, then slowly allowing it to accrue naturalistic detail, he made it feel fresh-minted. The Doctor takes Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi, written in 1912, and turns it into a humane and challenging exploration of the ethical issues of our time.

Sarah Crompton

Best Musical

Evita, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

For someone who wasn’t even yet born in 1978, director Jamie Lloyd seems to be drawn to work from that year. He refashioned Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal to thrilling results and followed it with a makeover of Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice’s Evita. Gone, until the very end, were the traditional scenic and sartorial trappings, in favour of a fast, funky look at celebrity worship. The Argentine First Lady’s rise and fall speaks afresh to our politically divisive, pop-culture-mad age. This Evita rocked, as audiences will discover anew when it reopens at the Barbican next summer.

Matt Wolf

Best Musical Performance

Anne-Marie Duff, Sweet Charity, Donmar Warehouse

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

Sweet Charity, the 1966 musical by Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields, and Neil Simon, about the romantic travails of an eternally optimistic New York taxi dancer, is hard to love. It puts its lead character through the mill. Yet in former artistic director Josie Rourke’s swansong at the Donmar Warehouse, Anne-Marie Duff played Charity Hope Valentine with a permanently hopeful smile, combining rawness and warmth, her husky voice brimming with emotion. By going for grit over glitz, Duff made something captivating and heartbreaking, voice full of little hitches, eyes glittering with tears.

Natasha Tripney

Emerging Talent Award, in partnership with Access Entertainment

Laurie Kynaston, The Son, Kiln & Duke of York’s

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

Aggrieved teenager Nicolas in Florian Zeller’s The Son (translated by Christopher Hampton) is a gift for a young actor. Of the four male candidates for the title role (Zeller likes to keep you guessing), Nicolas gets the crucial scenes in this compelling exploration of the mental torment of a child of divorce. The actor needs exceptional gifts because scenes occur at varying levels of reality: Nicolas puts on different personae, while occurrences may be a figment of his or others’ imaginations. The actor has to make each moment feel real, until we discover they aren’t. Our huge shock when Kynaston, 25, fooled us was a tribute to his total control of role and audience.

ML

Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright

Jasmine Lee-Jones, seven methods of killing ​kylie jenner, Royal Court

(Dave Benett/Getty Images)
(Dave Benett/Getty Images)

In a year distinguished by strong new talents, Jasmine Lee-Jones made her mark with the blistering creative force of her writing: seven methods of killing kylie jenner knocks you sideways; witty, impassioned, topical, formally adventurous and structurally strong. Powered by fury at how voices of young black women are not being listened to, its exploration of the politics of gender, identity and race, and its understanding of social media, announced Lee-Jones as a writer who must be heard.

SC

Best Design, in partnership with Michael Kors

Bunny Christie, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bridge Theatre

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

Christie can bring a play to brilliant life. For Nicholas Hytner’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream she created a fantasy world that left audiences giddy with excitement. It gave us permission to rock along with this immersive show, and its performers. Hippolyta was imprisoned in a glass cage. Lovers leapt on and off beds as they erupted from the floor. Acrobats floated through the air, or spun from ropes. The most potent aspect was the accessibility. I overheard young theatregoers discussing how the set and costumes gave them a steer as to what the heck was going on. New to Shakespeare, they had initially felt a little lost. But not for long. “It’s like being at a non- stop party!’ one said. A rollicking party to which we were all invited.

Baz Bamigboye

Lebedev Award

Peter Brook For his contribution to theatre

(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

The Lebedev Award, given in the name of Evening Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, goes to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to theatre world. Few fit that bill as well as Peter Brook, whose radical attitudes to text, staging, movement and casting have informed much of the work we see today, and who at 94 is still creating and experimenting. His career began in the Forties world of Tyrone Guthrie and Binkie Beaumont. He directed Gielgud and Olivier and boosted the careers of Glenda Jackson and Helen Mirren. He collaborated with Dalí and Truman Capote. He shaped the RSC and our idea of how classics could be staged. Much of what we call physical, colour-blind or gender-blind theatre stems from his open, embracing mind.

NC

Editor’s Award

Sir Ian McKellen For his ​​“On Stage” tour

(Dave Benett)
(Dave Benett)

Sir Ian’s great act of generosity could not go unrecognised. As he approached 80, this theatrical knight, who has combined an outstanding classical career with movie stardom, panto, soap and sitcom, conceived the idea of an old-school tour. He would visit 80 venues, usually for one night, with a one-man show combining autobiography, Shakespeare and Lord of the Rings wizardry. All profits go to theatrical charities or restoring the venues. Then he settled into a West End run of the show, which continues at the Harold Pinter Theatre (atgtickets.com) until Jan 5

NC

The Official Platinum Partner of the 64th Evening Standard Theatre Awards is Michael Kors. Other partners include Audi, Laurent-Perrier, Maison Margiela, Monica Vinader and Tommy Hilfiger.

For more from last night’s awards, go to standard.co.uk/theatreawards, #ESTheatre Awards

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