Admittedly it’s a tiny amount, barely a tip by his standards, but the news that Cameron Mackintosh has contributed £10,000 towards Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Mayor of London is surely significant. For Cameron knows that Ken Livingstone has done nothing whatsoever for the West End theatre.

Late night transport for theatregoers is a shambles. Parking costs and conditions are criminal; if you want to leave a car, for instance, near the Aldwych or the Novello, it costs 40p for each five minutes up to 6.30pm, Saturdays included!

The congestion charges have kept many theatregoers out of the West End altogether. And Ken is more interested in clowns on stilts and token gestures of multiculturalism than he is in the “bourgeois” customers of Cameron and his colleagues. 

Talking of clowns, though, will Boris be better for London theatre? He’s more likely to listen, perhaps. But who’s going to do the complaining? I haven’t  heard Rosemary Squire OBE (Other Buggers Efforts), president of the Society of London Theatres,  berate Ken for his punitive and unhelpful non-policies.

The Olivier Awards might have been a good opportunity for her to have done so. Instead, the event passed by in the usual welter of bromide and back-slapping, though it was touching to hear Chiwetel Ejiofor dedicate his best actor gong for Othello to the late Ed Wilson, inspirational leader of the National Youth Theatre, where Chewy first bared his acting molars.

A big surprise, and a pleasant one, was the best actress award for Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull at the Royal Court. Ian Rickson’s Royal Court production is set for New York, where it will be co-presented by the Ambassador Theatre Group of Rosemary Squire and Howard Panter.

The Olivier Awards are not fixed, exactly, but we never really quite know how the results are carved up, or indeed, by whom. Nominees do have to be put up by the producers themselves, however, so there’s an inevitable feeling of self-promotion and self-interest which doesn’t attach to the Critics Circle, Evening Standard or Whatsonstage awards.

I was sorry to see that most newspaper coverage didn’t mention the brilliant  young Nigerian playwright Bola Agbaje, whose Gone Too Far! in the Theatre Upstairs (going Downstairs in July) won in the Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre category. Bola’s play was part of the Young Writers Festival that included Polly Stenham’s That Face, already garlanded with awards and heading for the West End.    

The Oliviers have been so named since 1984.They were founded as the SWET Awards (when SOLT was the Society of West End Theatres) by Ray Cooney in the early 1970s in order to honour the West End’s own, as all the established awards — then just the Standard and the Plays and Players awards — were going almost exclusively to the subsidised sector.

Almost immediately, the majority of the SWET awards also landed in the lap of the NT, the RSC and the Royal Court, and so it continues to this day. Now, of course, all the new playwriting creativity and best acting is indeed in the subsidised sector.

But I do think it regrettable that SOLT couldn’t have swung a few gongs the way of Boeing Boeing, Dealer’s Choice, Robert Lindsay in The Entertainer, The Letter, Kean and The Country Wife.

Hooray for Hairspray, indeed. But I think we’ve heard quite enough about War Horse and A Disappearing Number to be going along with for now, thanks all the same. If Brief Encounter doesn’t win at least two awards next year, SOLT should be sold off. And selling off would make a nice change from selling out. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:02 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.