North London's 325-seat Almeida theatre triumphs in eight award categories including best new play at award ceremony
Chimerica was the biggest winner, triumphing in the best new play, best director, best lighting, best sound and best set design categories. Photograph: Tristram Kenton It was a story of a small subsidised theatre taking on the West End and winning, with the Almeida emerging triumphant at Sunday night's Olivier awards. The 325-seat north London venue won eight awards for two plays that transferred into the West End: Lucy Kirkwood's new play, Chimerica, and a revival of Ghosts. Chimerica was the biggest winner at the 38th awards, held at the Royal Opera House. It won five: best new play, best director for Lyndsey Turner, best lighting, best sound and best set design. Kirkwood's epic play was part of Michael Attenborough's final season in charge of the theatre but was commissioned and nurtured over six years by the theatre company Headlong under Rupert Goold, who took over the Almeida last autumn. Telling the story of an American photojournalist searching for a lone protester who confronted a tank in Tiananmen Square, it felt as much a thriller as a meaty political play, exploring tensions between two global superpowers. Ghosts, which last month completed its run at the Trafalgar Studios, won three awards including best actress for Lesley Manville, who said afterwards: "I'm completely and utterly over the moon, I'm fizzing with delight." Manville, who cut her teeth at the Royal Court, said: "It is heart warming that subsidised theatres have done so well tonight."
Link to video: Watch a clip from the Olivier-winning Ghosts starring Lesley Manville and Jack Lowden
Link to video: Watch a clip from the Olivier-winning Ghosts starring Lesley Manville and Jack Lowden The Richard Eyre-directed and adapted play also won best revival and best actor in a supporting role for Jack Lowden, who played Oswald. Eyre said starting Ghosts at the Almeida had been important. "There is something emancipating about doing a show outside the West End where you don't think you have to hit the jackpot every time. You're not panicking about whether you can fill the theatre and there's not a hysterical pressure there sometimes is when you do a show in the West End and there's a lot of cash and reputation hanging on it." The Almeida's success showed the importance of a mixed ecology in theatre, Eyre said. "You can't have one without the other. If subsidised theatre dwindled overnight you would find a very depleted commercial theatre. You can look on subsidy as investment and it is and it's investment that is repaid many times over." It was also a good night for the National theatre which Eyre ran in the 1990s, with Rory Kinnear winning best actor for Iago in Othello, triumphing from a heavyweight shortlist that included Jude Law, Tom Hiddleston and Henry Goodman. Kinnear, who is taking a month off after the birth of his second child, said the play had been "the most thrilling professional experience" of his life.
News Source:www.theguardian.com
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