There are some things one can applaud in the list of nominations for the Olivier awards. It is good to see the Young Vic, after another dazzling year, getting a total of 11 citations with A View from the Bridge and A Streetcar Named Desire well to the fore. As usual, the best new play nominations, with King Charles III the obvious frontrunner, stem from the subsidised sector. And it’s heartening to find two fine actors, Tanya Moodie and Juma Sharkah, being recognised in the category of outstanding achievement in affiliate theatre.
But, as so often, I’m struck by some startling omissions. Although the RSC production of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies pops up in a number of lists, I am staggered that there is no nomination for Ben Miles for his performance as Thomas Cromwell. For my money, his Cromwell had a brooding watchfulness, sense of inner grief and implacable determination that eclipsed Mark Rylance’s performance in the TV adaptation. Rylance’s quietude worked well on camera but Miles’s Cromwell was a far more complex character: a legal fixer with a secret, class-based contempt for the nobility around him.
I’m also sorry to see no mention anywhere of Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk which came to the National from the Galway festival. At the very least, there should be some recognition in the best supporting actor category for Stephen Rea: turning up half way through the play in a crumpled suit and with a cigarette louchely dangling from his lips, he exuded a strange sense of divine omniscience. In the same category, I’d also loved to have seen the name of Tim McMullan for his performance in the Donmar version of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons: playing the eternal Russian figure of the superfluous man, McMullan showed the same exquisite finesse he’s currently bringing to his dual roles in the National’s Man and Superman.
It’s not a bad list and there are some things that give one cause to cheer: I’m especially glad to see the recognition for Mark Hayhurst’s Taken at Midnight and for Penelope Wilton’s mesmerising performance as the mother of a Jewish lawyer fighting for her son’s life in the Germany of the 1930s. But I can’t join the promoters of the awards in their claim that it’s been a great year for musicals: in some ways it’s been a thin year with only Memphis: The Musical, among the four nominees for best new musical, offering the satisfaction of a traditional storyline. And I’m puzzled that Robert Lindsay, who dominated the stage with a raffish elan in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, doesn’t get a look-in for best actor in a musical.
But all awards are a lottery. The best one can say about the Oliviers is that they just occasionally get things right and give the theatre itself the oxygen of publicity.
