Excellent to hear that Roger Allam has won Best Actor for his Falstaff at the Globe, against very stiff competition. It makes him a three-time Olivier winner, and it's richly deserved. Now that the RSC's seasons in London are structured so that none of their plays can qualify because the individual runs are too short, there's a risk that the Bard gets forgotten at award time, so it's a boost for Shakespeare too. I thought Allam's performance was of a quality that comes around once a decade, and I hope it encourages more top-flight actors to take the plunge and act at the Globe.
Great news for Nancy Carroll (also one of my favourites) winning Best Actress for After The Dance, which picked up four awards; director Thea Sharrock got the Best Revival, Hildegard Bechtler Best Costume Design and Adrian Scarborough Best Supporting Actor. Hurrah for all of them.
I can't comment on shows I haven't seen. Of those I did see, I have to say Clybourne Park, which won Best New Play for the Royal Court Theatre, left me distinctly underwhelmed. Very funny, but it seemed to me to pull its punches. I would have picked David Greig's Dunsinane, the excellent sequel to Macbeth which the RSC is reviving at Stratford this year. I liked it so much I'm going to see it again and I still think it will be a classic long after Clybourne Park is forgotten.
I'm not surprised that Howard Davies won Best Director for The White Guard. After all, nobody in London knows much about Bulgakov or appreciates just what violence was perpetrated on the original by Andrew Upton's crudely rewritten 'version'. This was an ugly travesty of a great and little-known Russian writer who deserved better treatment at the hands of the National Theatre. Now Upton and Davies are going to do a 'version' of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard and I look forward to that with trepidation. Let's hope Davies finally gets the message that Upton is not a great writer like Gorky, Bulgakov or Chekhov, and shouldn't be allowed to change the meaning of the original. There are special labour camps beyond the Urals for people who mess around with Anton Pavlovich.
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