Current indications show that over 80,000 people watched Official London Theatre’s live stream of Sunday’s Laurence Olivier Awards, making this year’s ceremony one of the most high-profile and eagerly awaited of recent years.
Though experienced stage stars Mark Rylance (Best Actor – Jerusalem) and Samantha Spiro (Best Actress in a Musical or Entertainment – Hello, Dolly!) both picked up the second Olivier Awards of their careers, the evening was predominantly a triumph of youth over experience.
No one epitomised the evening more than 28-year-old American playwright Katori Hall, whose play The Mountaintop was the surprise winner of the ceremony, beating the favourite, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, as well as Lucy Prebble’s Enron and John Logan’s Red to win Best New Play.
“I am just honoured to be at the table,” said a jubilant Hall after collecting her award, which makes her the first black female playwright to win a Laurence Olivier Award. “They are writers that I absolutely admire and look up to and to be a 28-year-old woman and doing this, winning this award, is amazing. London has treated me well.”
Also attesting to the strength of young talent in the West End, newcomers Aneurin Barnard and Iwan Rheon both won for their professional debuts in Spring Awakening – beating experienced actors including Sheila Hancock, Alexander Hanson and Rowan Atkinson – rising stars Eddie Redmayne (Red) and Ruth Wilson (A Streetcar Named Desire) triumphed in the supporting performance categories and 29-year-old playwright Mike Bartlett won for his play Cock at the Royal Court.
“I know I wrote the play, but what matters is that you’ve got to work together, and everyone worked together really well and it was brilliant,” said Bartlett. “That’s what theatre is, it’s collaboration.”
While the ceremony was awash with British talent, there was a strong showing from across the Atlantic too. In addition to Hall’s triumph, the Broadway transfer of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof won Best Revival, while short-lived musical Spring Awakening, which originated on Broadway, celebrated four wins, including Best New Musical.
It was an emotional evening for the show’s LA-based lyricist, Steven Sater, who said the win was “a memorial” for the show which, despite strong reviews, had its West End run curtailed after transferring from the Lyric Hammersmith early last year. “I’m so happy I came over [from the US]. It feels like a dream come true,” he said. “It was very affecting because the show passed so quickly and yet the show was so beautiful and I’m so proud of this acknowledgement of our achievement here. It did so brilliantly at the Lyric Hammersmith and got such great reviews. I think somehow there was an impression from the reviews that this show was racy or something and there were crowds of people who wouldn’t come and of course it’s not that way at all.”
The evening also vindicated another musical which began life on Broadway, Wicked. Despite failing to win any Olivier Awards in its opening year in 2007, the blockbuster musical took home this year’s brand new award, the Audience Award, voted for by more than 58,000 readers of www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk.
“It’s so great that so many people have gotten involved and feel part of this, I think that’s what so great about the award itself. It does give the ticket buying public a voice,” said Wicked producer Michael McCabe. “We have been very lucky, every time the public has had a chance to vote Wicked has done extremely well. I think it’s always just one of those shows that the public love; they love its emotions and its spectacle, and long may it last. I think that it’s great that there is a chance, even when you are nearly four-years-old, to still get an honour like this.”
It was also a happy night for the cast and creative team of the Open Air theatre’s production of Hello, Dolly! – which bagged three awards including Best Musical Revival – and Rupert Goold, who followed his 2008 win for Macbeth with a second Best Director Laurence Olivier Award for Enron.
“I remember two years ago I came home after winning and thought ‘that’s the end of my life, that’s the highpoint of my life, I’ll look back on this night and think it was downhill from there,’” Goold told Official London Theatre. “And I suppose you don’t want to be judged by one thing, you want to be more as a director in the bigger sense. It’s a dream, a really weird dream.”
Unlike the evening’s surprise winners, Goold was widely predicted to win this year, as were Best Actress Rachel Weisz and Best Actor Rylance. Unusually, the Jerusalem actor didn’t quote a Lewis Jenkins poem in his acceptance speech, as he has done at previous awards ceremonies. Instead he paid tribute to Laurence Olivier and the “sense of family” that the award represented. Speaking to Official London Theatre later he added: “It [Jerusalem] was special to me when I read the script. I didn’t know it would be special to everyone else but I do things that mean something to me and I’m in a lucky enough position to do that and I think if I couldn’t do that I would do some other work and would be an amateur actor. I don’t feel I want to invite people to pay money for stories unless I feel that they’re an interesting story.”
The award for most excited winner must go to Tim Whitnall, whose one-man show about the late comedian Eric Morecambe took home Best Entertainment. “I’m not letting him go!” he said, clutching his bronze statuette to his chest, before conceding: “It’s a pretty democratic victory so I think we’ll probably share him. Bob Golding, who plays Eric so brilliantly, he and I just keep pinching each other saying ‘what could possibly be better than this?’ and it gets better and better and better. And also I think to bring a new piece into the West End in the worst winter in 30 years without a name in it, this award just makes it even more of a special thing to have achieved, it really does.”
Video highlights, photos, news stories and a full list of winners are available on our dedicated Laurence Olivier Awards pages.
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