If the Laurence Olivier Awards are handed out and no one is around to hear them, do they make a noise? That thought kept occurring to me during the 34th annual gong-giving knees-up March 8, a great evening that will remain the largely exclusive preserve of those who were there. Some of those involved were perfectly happy not to have the inevitable tension inbuilt at such occasions broadcast for all to see. “It doesn’t feel like a televised event,” Steven Hoggett, the somewhat surprising winner of best theater choreographer for the night’s big winner, Black Watch, told me in the Great Room of the Grosvenor House, immediately following the ceremony, “so it has its own integrity. As [best actor winner] Derek Jacobi put it, it only happens in this room: we were here; we saw it.”
And that is so. Whereas the Oliviers were once televised to BBC audiences who numbered in the vicinity of seven million, that long ago ceased to be the case, London’s nearest equivalent to the Tonys looking on as the show was alternately truncated, delayed for transmission until a later slot (or even a subsequent night), and, eventually, dropped altogether, viewership by that point having slipped below the psychologically crucial threshold of one million.
Now, the gala dinner-cum-entertainment functions probably as the Oscars and their like used to in the days, pre-television, when Hollywood’s biggest night was essentially an industry confab with food and drink to calm frayed nerves. And while that’s no bad thing necessarily, one wonders why some sort of other outlet can’t be found, in an internet age where perhaps the entire show could be streamed on line or perhaps some interested (and deep-pocketed) cable or satellite channel could pick up the slack. It may sound preposterous, but I for one can’t help but feel that an American specialist broadcaster might generate a sizable audience for the Oliviers, even though the annual shindig focuses on London theater, ballet, and opera at the exclusion of work from around the regions or productions only seen States-side. The fact is, enough of London’s cultural diet has a recognizable ring overseas that theater buffs in New York and elsewhere would by no means feel left out of the party. And August: Osage County – the place name consistently mispronounced by nominee reader David Suchet, by the way – was, after all, up for a slew of prizes and won for Todd Rosenthal’s set.
How many musical theater mavens the world over, for instance, would kill to have seen the richly deserving actor/actress in a musical winners, Douglas Hodge and Elena Roger, strutting their stuff in solo performance stints at the Oliviers, both in superlative form. For erstwhile La Cage Aux Folles star Hodge, who delivered the most achingly truthful “I Am What I Am” that I have ever heard, the evening was especially bittersweet since the performer’s father had died exactly three days earlier. “I wasn’t going to come [to the ceremony], and my mom phoned me and said, `If you don’t go, I’ll never forgive you; he would love you to go.’” It turned out, too, that Hodge senior had shifted 180 degrees in his personal view of his son’s trophy-bearing role as Albin, aka the drag artiste Zaza. “When I was offered the part, if I’m honest, my dad said, `I don’t think you should do it: what’s it going to be — distasteful? sleazy?’” an emotional Hodge told me at evening’s end. “And it won him over; the show won him over because it’s about family and love and commitment and long relationships: everything he believed in. It breaks my heart that he’s not here tonight.”
It breaks my heart that no one outside the hotel itself got the full sweep of a night compered by the inimitable James Nesbitt, the cheeky Irish actor who kept a lengthy evening swinging along (a dinner interval included) without evident use of an autocue (and, presumably, none of the sort of earpiece assistance so favored by Richard Dreyfuss of late at the Old Vic). I was very sorry that The Norman Conquests didn’t win anything, though there was recompense after a fashion in the stupendously moving special award that was given to its author, Alan Ayckbourn, in recognition of a prolific career that is quite simply without peer. And co-presenting the prize (with Ayckbourn regular Liza Goddard), Old Vic supremo Kevin Spacey quite sensibly opted this time to shake the playwright’s hand, lest we get a repeat of the incident at the end of the trilogy’s triumphant press day last fall when Spacey’s overenthusiastic bear hug sent the enfeebled scribe tumbling into the first row of the audience.
The speeches were virtually without fail graceful and gracious, Jacobi considerably more touching as he fondled his Olivier – paying rich tribute to the trophy’s namesake – than he was as Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Indeed, even though I didn’t agree with some of the choices of winners, it was worth their moment in the spotlight to hear what they had to say. “I’m so excited! I’m sorry; I’m American,” enthused Zorro’s visiting Yank, Lesli Margherita, who copped the prize for outstanding supporting performance in a musical. Margherita then went on to proclaim of her cast with disarming candour, “I love, like, 95% of you.” One assumes the remaining five percent took the implicit knock with an oh-so-British stuff upper lip.
Tags: London Theatre Reviews