The triumph of Jamie Lloyd’s reinvented Sunset Boulevard at this year’s Olivier awards seemed to send a positive signal to those who seek to show some daring in the West End. After scooping seven awards, the musical can certainly rest assured that it will make its transfer to Broadway on a high. Yet even with its technical dazzle and powerful performances, I’m not entirely convinced. Arising from the hugely commercial (and slightly cheesy?) Andrew Lloyd Webber stable with A-list casting in Nicole Scherzinger, who was named best actress in a musical, I was left wondering: how radical or risky is that, exactly?
Brian Cox, while presenting the best play award to James Graham for Dear England, said he had never seen British theatre doing better. As much as I admire Cox’s elderman wisdom, I question that it is in a roaring state. It has cleaved to safety since the pandemic pause and seems willing only to take risks now within the relatively safe bounds of revivals, film adaptations and big-name castings.
Ironically, the single-celebrity vehicles that seem to have become their own genre of late, show far more genuine radicalism and it is gratifying to see Andrew Scott’s Vanya recognised as well as Sarah Snook’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both are immensely deserving wins with Snook, when collecting her award for best actress, cutely thanking Oscar Wilde himself. Whatever you think of them, they are immersed in high-wire creativity.
Part of the bigger problem with this year’s Oliviers was the abysmally narrow remit of nominations. So male, so white and, on the whole, so vanilla in its choices. If we look away for a moment, does all diversity and gender parity simply go away? What happened to Lucy Kirkwood’s effervescent musical, The Witches, loved by so many? To Josie Rourke’s Dancing at Lughnasa, with its powerhouse female cast? To Ruth Wilson’s extraordinary turn in the 24-hour experimental The Second Woman? To Danny Sapani’s astounding King Lear? And Hayley Squires’ adrenalised performance in Death of England: Closing Time?
For me, the biggest, most deserved win of the night was Operation Mincemeat (one gong for best new musical, another to Jak Malone as best actor in a supporting role for a musical). This show rose from the Fringe and has been many years in its journey to the West End. It is the same for Hadestown, a Marmite musical that grew its way to Broadway and is the musical of the year for me so far (I regret not giving it the full five stars) – but which became one of last night’s wronged losers.
But the greatest crime of omission was surely Nicholas Hytner’s Guys and Dolls, which received one award for Arlene Phillips and James Cousins’ choreography despite nine nominations. If ever there was a thumpingly reinvented musical, this was it. More outrageous that the stupendously talented Marisha Wallace went home empty-handed along with Charlie Stemp in his lead in Crazy for You, and who brought moves like Fred Astaire to it.
It was gratifying to see the sensational Stranger Things pick up two gongs. It is a theatrical extravaganza, albeit inside Netflix’s commercial safety net (co-director Stephen Daldry thanked the network in his speech). In the Oliviers’ ceremony itself, there were moving shout-outs to mothers, most poignantly by Haydn Gwynne’s sons, who collected her posthumous award for best actress in a supporting role (for When Winston Went to War with the Wireless).
An end sequence marked 60 years of the National Theatre with the outgoing artistic director, Rufus Norris, and incoming one, Indhu Rubasingham, on stage. They met in the middle for a handover hug and it looked like it could have been choreographed for a Cultural Olympiad but even for this cynical critic, it was a reminder of publicly funded theatre and how Rubasingham’s tenure will hopefully bring the edge that is lacking right now.
