The Evening Standard Awards for 2009 were decided on Friday and will be announced on 23 November.

Which means that important shows opening in the next few weeks — the Alan Bennett play at the National, new plays by Mike Bartlett and Michael Wynne at the Royal Court, the RSC Twelfth Night — won’t be considered.

And what about the brilliant new Annie Get Your Gun at the Young Vic, which opened only a few hours after the deliberations were concluded?

It’s the only possible rival to Spring Awakening in the best musical category, unless there’s a rush of blood for Sister Act or Priscilla.

Why are these awards decided so early? They never used to be. But when the Oliviers were brought forward to gazump the Standard gongs, the Standard promptly moved even earlier. This was pretty silly and showed instant loss of dignity.

Even so, there was the question of television coverage, a mitigating factor in this lunacy. But now there is none. The television coverage has evaporated along with the loss of prestige and public regard.

So the Standard should revert gracefully to the sensible practice of a proper annual — January to December — evaluation.

As it is, we wait with half-bated breath to see if this year’s nominations will bother to include the rump of last year’s overlooked treasures, which all opened in November or December 2008: David Hare’s Gethsemane, easily the best play of that year; the Donmar’s breathtaking Family Reunion; August:Osage County; the Menier’s Little Night Music; the Donmar’s West End Twelfth Night (the best production of the play for years); the wittily pared down Sunset Boulevard.

I would guess it’s going to be a close-run contest this year between Jerusalem and Enron for best play. A good compromise would be best play for Enron, best actor for Mark Rylance.

But what about the blitz of great Matthew Kelly performances in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Trafalgar, Troilus and Cressida at the Globe, Howard Barker’s Victory at the Arcola and now Comedians at the Lyric Ham? 

Spring Awakening has to be the best musical – the Standard would look very silly if it weren’t — and best actress might be a predictable tussle between Helen Mirren’s Phedre and Rachel Weisz’s Blanche DuBois, neither of which I really rated. I’d vote for Naomi Frederick’s Rosalind in the Globe.

The best overall productions of the year so far were Burnt by the Sun at the National (I didn’t see the highly acclaimed All’s Well), Enjoy and A View from the Bridge in the West End, and Peer Gynt at the Barbican.

But Annie Get Your Gun would get my best show prize, just pipping two other outstanding Young Vic productions, Pictures from an Exhibition and Kursk. Stirring in Kafka’s Monkey and Been So Long, it’s been a really vintage year for David Lan’s powerhouse in the Cut, worthy of a special award, I’d say.

I hope when the rest of the awards come round they make note of Hello, Dolly! in Regent’s Park and two absolute gems at the Union in Southwark, the revivals of Company and The Pirates of Penzance.

Why? Because the Standard almost certainly won’t.

Is Enron, incidentally, a better play than David Hare’s The Power of Yes? I’d say it is, but the Hare play, which I caught up with at the weekend, is a brilliant outline for a play, a fascinating documentary in a tip-top production by Angus Jackson.

The last half hour is particularly good — Adair Turner, the chair of the Financial Services Authority, whom I know a bit, really comes into his own in Malcolm Sinclair’s brutally clipped delivery — but Anthony Calf is a little stooped and moth-eaten (baggy trousers, brown corduroy jacket) as the playwright himself; he should surely be attired in a designer suit supplied by his wife, Nicole Fahri.

Oddly, I found the painstakingly explanatory sections of The Power of Yes much harder to follow than the hard-core financial information.

But a packed Sunday matinee audience — which included many Americans, John Sessions and Ian McKellen — hung on every word. Two interesting nuggets: Bruce Myers, so good as George Soros, greets our playwright as “Mr Hare” rather than “Sir David.”

And Hare declares that he keeps all his money in the Post Office, which isn’t too far from the truth. I gather that Sir David, like the late Bernard Levin, has a deep-dyed mistrust of, and loathing for, all forms of savings and investment, and keeps all his dosh in the one current bank account. Let’s hope it’s not the Royal Bank of Scotland.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 9:02 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.