A "militantly elegant Arkadina": Kristin Scott Thomas, along with Chiwetel Ejiofor, in The Seagull. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Michael Billington thinks that the Evening Standard Theatre Awards should be taken with "several pinches of salt." Why so meek? All awards should be taken with a vat of saline.
Apart from anything else (the arts aren't, after all, engaged in some aesthetic egg-and-spoon race for prizes), putting together a number of fallible creatures and calling them judges doesn't make for a collective Olympian judgment, though it obscures individual prejudices and passions. If you're lucky as a judge, you'll get one Twelve Angry Men moment, when you convince the other panellists that something you're rooting for is desirable, or at any rate tolerable. Trouble is, the other Angries have their moment, too: no one comes out with all their favourites intact. As it happens, I agree with Michael Billington that Kristin Scott Thomas (who, like several strong actors, was on the long but not the short list) provided one of the high points of the year with her militantly elegant Arkadina in The Seagull.
Nevertheless, I think the 2008 Awards will stand up well to scrutiny over the next few years. In some respects, they mark a turning point. It's important that the wonderful Punchdrunk company were shortlisted for the second year running: their extraordinary installations in unexpected London places have helped to change the idea of what a dramatic experience can be, and to bring new audiences into the theatre. Two years ago, their show The Firebird's Ball was scarcely reviewed; last year's Faust had a slow critical take-up; now they draw huge audiences.
The special award to the inspired architect Steve Tompkins, who worked with Punchdrunk at BAC, is a further acknowledgment that what happens in the theatre doesn't end with speech and text, and doesn't stop on the stage. The celebration of the National's equine triumph War Horse, which tells its story with the help of puppets and music and great pools of light and shade, was a further acknowledgment of new waves of movement theatre. As was the award for best play to a devised work - Complicite's whirl of vivid images and arithmetical conjuring, A Disappearing Number.
It's surely a strongly varied list which celebrates these largely non-verbal works alongside George Bernard Shaw's great bag of words, and Polly Stenham's fierce social realism. Pass the cruet, Michael Billington.
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