Richard Bean: applauded for One Man, Two Guvnors © Stephanie Methven
Some Award-Winning Favourites from the 25 Years of the Awards
Jane Edwardes
Michael Coveney
Lucy Prebble: The Sugar Syndrome (2003)
I didn’t vote for her, but I’m glad others did. It’s amazing how
prescient and just so many winning nominations have been over 25 years, but
especially in this category, from Philip Ridley and Martin McDonagh through
to Nina Raine and Polly Stenham, great talents all, original and sparkish.
Libby Purves
Stephen Sondheim: Merrily We Roll Along (2012)
It is the surprises you remember. This was one of Sondheim’s less successful
musicals in its time, with a perverse backwards structure and few memorable
tunes, but Maria Friedman’s brave revival made it suddenly flare into clarity,
vigour and truth. The ending, an irony on a generation’s hope, left me
stunned.
Clive Hirschhorn
Tom Stoppard: Arcadia (1993)
The past and the present overlapped to brilliant effect in Arcadia,
arguably the finest English-speaking play to emerge in the last decade of the
20th century. The elegance of Tom Stoppard’s language, the complexity of its
themes (chaos versus disorder, the misinterpretations of past events by
present historians and scientists) and its intriguing parallel plot-lines combined
to exhilarating effect in Trevor Nunn’s stunning original production. A
masterpiece.
Aleks Sierz
Philip Ridley: The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992)
Some theatre shows blow your mind. This was the case with
Philip Ridley’s shocking but poetic second play, first put on at the Hampstead
in a production that introduced a very young Jude Law, who played an even
younger 15-year-old. I’ll never forget Con O’Neill and Jonathan Coy as the
main characters and Emma Amos as the Cockney teen. The play was very
funny, but also frightening in its climax, when a pregnant women gets kicked
in the stomach. It was provocative new writing, controversial as well as
beautifully wrought.
Gerald Berkowitz
Tony Kushner: Angels In America (1992)
In an American canon dominated by domestic melodramas, Angels in
America took on no less a subject than the entire American experience, as
filtered through the prism of the AIDS years, with an audacity of invention and
breadth of imagination not seen since the early experiments of Eugene
O’Neill.
Heather Neill
Tom Stoppard: Arcadia (1993)
In this challenging, moving, funny and humane play, Tom Stoppard combines
science and art, intellectual rigour and emotion in a swirling narrative which
plays with time while rooting the action in a particular, changing, place – a
country house. He examines Classical order and Romanticism while providing
plentiful opportunities for his actors.
Carole Woddis
Michael Frayn: Copenhagen (1998); Joe Penhall: Blue/Orange (2000)
Two thrilling intellectual and emotional rides: the one through history and
Heisenberg’s Theory of Uncertainty, as exhilarating and stretching as a good
downhill ski run: the other, similarly hermetic, in which Joe Penhall bravely
confronted psychiatry and power relations through the prism of schizophrenia
and the black community.
Ian Shuttleworth
Jez Butterworth: Mojo (2005)
Twenty-six-year-old Jez Butterworth has come a long way in the five years
since, with bizarre inspiration, he co-scripted a stage adaptation of
Katharine Whitehorn’s recipe book Cooking In A Bedsitter. Mojo
mixes sex and drugs and rock’n’roll with gang warfare and a marvellously
black comic sensibility. Butterworth enjoys writing about brutal,
amoral politicking and counter-politicking, and with Mojo he has hit the
jackpot; he leaves the audience, like his characters, scrambling to keep
up with barely suggested twists, but grimly enjoying the struggle.
Robert Tanitch
Chiwetel Ejiofor: Blue/Orange (2000)
Charismatic, brilliantly alternating between the rational and irrational.
Jane Edwardes
Simon McBurney: Mnemonic (1999)
Experimental companies don’t often fit neatly into the categories required by
award ceremonies, so it’s surprising and pleasing that the ever-inventive
Complicite has won two awards for Best Play. Mnemonic is my favourite in
which we were encouraged to feel a link between a 4000 year-old mummy
and our lives today.
Ray Bennett
Mark Rylance: Jerusalem (2009)
Mark Rylance gives a relentlessly entertaining performance as a
ferociously and hilariously vulgar rascal with a rampaging lust for life in Jez
Butterworth’s raucous and exhilarating play that captivates from the start and
right away makes the three-hour running time seem that it will be much too
short.
Matt Trueman
Sam Mendes: Twelfth Night; Uncle Vanya (2002)
It’s 5am. I’m 17, skiving off school to get day seats to that final
Mendes double-bill. Twelfth Night. Uncle Vanya. Linked by a line from a
sonnet: ‘Oh learn to read what silent love hath writ.’ And Simon Russell Beale,
of course; his Vanya, a husk; his Malvolio, an insurrection.
Philip Fisher
William Dudley: The Coast of Utopia Trilogy (2002)
With this design, William Dudley changed the face of theatre forever. By
introducing computer-generated imagery, he added an extra dimension to the
visual presentation of plays and musicals. In addition, he allowed directors to
speed up scene changes, reducing running time and also providing them with
the possibility of eliminating dull blackouts.
Michael Darvell
Richard Bean: One Man, Two Guvnors (2011)
I saw Richard Bean’s play, an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s farce, A Servant
of Two Masters, one Sunday afternoon when I have never heard laughter like
it in a London theatre. The combination of Bean’s script, Nicholas Hytner’s
direction and James Corden’s lead performance proved to be absolute comic
perfection.