Queen of the West End
RALPH FIENNES and Sophie Okonedo have become the first pair in 30 years to pick up the best actor and actress prize for the same production at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
Playing Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s epic tragedy of the same name, Fiennes and Okonedo were described by judges as being “at the top of their game” in Simon Godwin’s National Theatre production.
This is the second time in three years that Fiennes has walked away with the best actor prize, winning it in 2016 for his roles in The Master Builder and Richard III. The last time two lead actors in the same production won the top prizes at the awards ceremony was 1988, when Lindsay Duncan and Eric Porter were rewarded for their performances in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Time Out magazine wrote at the time: “superlative, scorching performances” while The Guardian said it was “not to be missed”.
Okonedo is best known for her Academy Award-nominated role in Hotel Rwanda. Since then, she has won a Tony for best featured actress in a play (A Raisin in the Sun) as well as a Golden Globe for The Secret Life of Bees.
In Antony and Cleopatra, “Okonedo radiates amusement, wilfulness, all the necessary push and pull of attitudes,” said Dominic Cavendish, The Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic.
“Around her, the director does much to answer the play’s equivalent tug between epic and domestic, exotic and politic, tragedy and comedy, laying out the complex action with calmness and clarity,” he added.
Earlier this year, Godwin said: “Cleopatra is an iconic part, but it is vertiginous and it requires guts. And Sophie has guts.
“She isn’t vain and she is willing to go to strange and dark places. She is radiant and sexy and she can be emotionally true.”
On Fiennes, he said: “Failure hangs over the play, and the trap is to play Antony like he’s a failure. Ralph will make him a man of action, of intensity and heroism, rather than a depleted figure.”
Theatregoers wishing to see the play before its final show on Jan 19 next year will need to hurry to buy tickets. As of last night, the only seats available were at 1:30pm on Dec 5.
Elsewhere, a radical revision of Company, by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, won Marianne Elliott the best director award.
She switched the gender of the leading man to a woman, giving Rosalie Craig the role of a lifetime and the Evening Standard Award for best musical performance.
Hamilton, the West End’s other unstoppable musical, also won two prizes. Lin-manuel Miranda’s hip-hop history, which opened last December, was named best musical.
Jamael Westman, its leading star, also collected the award for emerging talent.
At a star-studded event last night at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, Phoebe Waller-bridge was the presenter and Evgeny Lebedev, the newspaper’s 38-year-old Russian owner, was the host. He was joined by Anna Wintour, Claire Foy and Idris Elba.
In the annual awards, now in their 64th year, prizes were handed out by Andrew Garfield, Richard Madden, Stella Mccartney, Jenna Coleman and Paapa Essiedu.