Glenda Jackson’s return to the stage after a 25-year career change as a Labour politician has been rewarded with one of the UK’s leading theatre awards.
Her King Lear at the Old Vic won her the best actress prize at the London Evening Standard theatre awards, presented on Sunday evening.
The other big winners at what are the UK’s longest-running theatre awards, established in 1955, were Jez Butterworth’s play The Ferryman and Andrew Garfield, who won best actor.
Before she was elected to parliament in 1992, Jackson was one of the UK’s most popular and celebrated actors, as comfortable as Cleopatra on the Morecambe and Wise TV show as she was in an avant garde Peter Brook stage play or in a Hollywood movie.
Her anger at Thatcherism drove her decision to move into politics. “Anything I could have done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher’s government out, I was prepared to do,” she said in an interview with the Guardian last year. “I could not believe what she was doing to this country.”
When Thatcher died, Jackson in the Commons chamber memorably attacked her “heinous social, economic and spiritual damage”, adding: “The first prime minister deputed by female gender … OK. But a woman? Not on my terms.”
At 80 she returned to theatre, taking on Shakespeare’s most demanding role and one, of course, written for a man.
But it was a performance that transcended gender, critics said. The Observer’s Susannah Clapp wrote of the “sandpaper voice; gliding movement; complete, ferocious concentration” that made Jackson’s performance “one of the most powerful Lears I have seen”.
Judges at the Evening Standard clearly agreed, awarding her a prize named in memory of the late Natasha Richardson. It adds to the two Oscars she won more than 40 years ago, for Women in Love and A Touch of Class. Jackson won from a shortlist that also included Laura Donnelly (The Ferryman) and Victoria Hamilton (Albion).
In total, nine awards were presented at a ceremony at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Three of them went to Butterworth’s Troubles-set family drama The Ferryman. It won best play, best director for Sam Mendes and the emerging talent award for Tom Glynn-Carney, who played a teenage firebrand.
The best actor award went to Garfield, awarded 11 years after the same awards gave him the outstanding newcomer prize for his role in Beautiful Thing.
Garfield won on Sunday night for his portrayal of the Aids patient Prior Walter in the National Theatre’s revival of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America. His fellow nominees were Andrew Scott for Hamlet and Bertie Carvel for his portrayal of Rupert Murdoch in Ink.
Amber Riley won the best musical performance prize for Dreamgirls, from a shortlist that also included Janie Dee for Follies and Robert Fairchild in An American in Paris.
Other awards were best design, going to Bunny Christie for three plays (Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, Ink, and The Red Barn); and the most promising playwright prize, which went to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for An Octoroon at the Orange Tree.
One prize was voted for by the public: the Evening Standard Radio 2 audience award for best musical. It went to Bat Out of Hell – the Musical, triumphing over An American In Paris, Dreamgirls, Follies, School Of Rock, The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ and She Loves Me.
