The annual awards season has kicked off with the announcement of the Evening Standard’s long list and as usual the omissions are at least as interesting as those nominated.
How any best actress list can include Phoebe Nicholls’s admittedly striking support performance in Waste at the Almeida yet omit any mention of Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking and Elena Roger in Piaf is the biggest mystery of all.
And while the best actor list rightly includes Kenneth Branagh as Ivanov and Jonathan Slinger for his RSC double of Richard II and Richard III, there’s no room for the one truly outstanding performance of the year — Douglas Hodge in La Cage aux Folles — or for Ralph Fiennes for his impressive comedy and tragedy double in God of Carnage (a play omitted from the best play category along with Fat Pig) and Oedipus.
And surely there was a case for bracketing Kevin Spacey with his partner Jeff Goldblum in Speed-the-Plow. Theirs was the most electrifying double act on the London stage since Morecambe and Wise, and one performance meant very little without the other.
The best play list is particularly limp and unadventurous. No mention here of Robert Lepage’s masterpiece Lipsynch, or the two most original and (in my view) remarkable plays of the year, Philip Ridley’s Piranha Heights or Anthony Neilson’s Relocated.
Still, awards are always a lottery and as long as they’re fun, publicise the theatre, and reward the right people (even if this sometimes happens for the wrong reason), then nobody much minds.
Our own Whatsonstage nominations party on 5 December will be the highlight of the year for many people, while the sit-down lunch for the Standard awards on 24 November has been moved this year from the Savoy Hotel to the Royal Opera House.
At least, I hope it’s still sit-down. A stand-up buffet would be torture. Richard Wilson is again hosting the Standard bash, making the best of a bad job, as he did last year, in following the irreplaceable Ned Sherrin.
The only trouble with the Standard awards — and the Oliviers — is that they have lost much kudos in forfeiting their television outlet so the event remains more parochial than it should be.
And having them so early in the year — the panel of judges made their decisions weeks ago – eliminates several highly significant big shows from the mix, notably (in the days immediately following the Standard lunch) August:Osage County at the National and Wig Out! at the Royal Court.
That last play is by Tarell Alvin McCraney, who makes some claim to being the playwright of the year, after the sensational impact of both In The Red and Brown Water (nominated in the design category) and the return of The Brothers Size at the Young Vic.
That’s the kind of lateral thinking missing from the Standard awards, which seem happier to shower endless nominations on the Donmar Warehouse and its magnificent, though hardly adventurous, revival of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden.
The best director category will be hotly contested by Michael Grandage for his triple whammy of Othello, The Chalk Garden and Ivanov, and by Michael Boyd for the RSC Histories and Rupert Goold for another triple whammy of Six Characters, No Man’s Land and — my third favourite play of the year — The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at the Almeida.