London Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2013: the ones to watch

The London stage is bursting with acting talent — Fiona Mountford talks to the stars in the making who are shortlisted for our Theatre Awards, which take place on Sunday November 17
12 November 2013

Milton Shulman award for Outstanding Newcomer

Each year at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards, one prize is awaited with particular anticipation. This is the Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer, which points the way to theatre’s future by highlighting the names to look for in years to come. Our judges have a stellar record as talentspotters: Andrew Garfield, Tom Hardy and Eddie Redmayne have all won in the past decade, as has, in 2000, Chiwetel Ejiofor, shortlisted this year for Best Actor. It was winning this award in 2001 for his production of Afore Night Come that established the career of Rufus Norris, incoming artistic director of the National Theatre.

From a particularly strong longlist in 2013, which included Jeremy Irons’s son, Max, for his role in Farragut North at the Southwark Playhouse and Kate O’Flynn’s strong-willed young heroine of Port at the National Theatre, here are the four who made our shortlist.


CAOILFHIONN DUNNE

The name is pronounced “Keelan” and Dunne’s Twitter biography includes the phrase “singer (when necessary)”. When is that? “It’s necessary when Conor McPherson says it is,” the Irish actress replies, pointing out that McPherson seems determined to involve her with music whenever he casts her in one of his plays. She was forced to sing on stage in The Veil at the National Theatre in 2011 and this year, in McPherson’s latest work, The Night Alive, at the Donmar Warehouse, she and her fellow cast members were involved in a “surreal” rendering of the Marvin Gaye song What’s Going On? “We hated doing the dance in rehearsals,” Dunne says. “It was cringing. But the audience’s reaction to it gave it life.”

Dunne’s performance as Aimee, one of a group of damaged people who congregate in a Dublin bedsit, drew high praise; “memorably bruised and vulnerable” was how one critic described it, and New York audiences will shortly get a chance to enjoy the production when it transfers there. Dublin-born Dunne, 29, who studied law at university before changing profession, is an increasingly well-known name in Irish acting circles. This is not least for her television role in Dublin gangland drama Love/Hate, for which she experienced verbal abuse in the street after her character killed Robert Sheehan’s. “If the best-looking boy in Irish television is taken out, you’re not going to be popular,” she says wryly.

Despite — or perhaps because of — this, she relished the relative anonymity of her time at the Donmar. “It’s a very nice kick up the backside after Ireland,” she says. “London audiences expect an awful lot and you have to meet them at the top — they’ve seen everything and everyone.”


SETH NUMRICH

“I think it’s hard to find plays and playwrights nowadays who go as far and are as scary and huge and have as much struggle as Tennessee Williams,” says American actor Seth Numrich. “What his plays are about scares us — and I think deep down we all want that from the theatre.” Numrich knows all about being scared by the ferocity of Williams’s writing, after featuring opposite Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall as good boy gone bad and small-town gigolo Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic. “It’s a terrifying beast of a play,” Numrich admits, “every night on stage I felt like I was on shaky ground.” Numrich’s performance certainly made the earth move for the critics, with Henry Hitchings describing him in this paper as “a revelation … a lovely mix of poise and fragility”.

It was in another Williams play, Summer and Smoke, that Minnesota native Numrich made his professional stage debut at the age of 12, encouraged by his actor/director father. “It dawned on me at that moment that making a living as an actor was possible,” he says. Home- schooled and completing his education early, he was the youngest person ever accepted to study at the theatre department of New York’s prestigious Julliard School.

Theatre is currently taking a backseat for Numrich, 26, as he is about to start filming major US television drama Turn, set during the American War of Independence. “The Americans were losing pretty badly to you guys!” he laughs, explaining George Washington’s decision to set up America’s first spy ring. His dream role would be Prince Hal in Henry IV Parts One and Two and he is eloquent in his admiration for the “risk-taking culture” of British theatre.


LUKE THOMPSON

It’s a pun too good to resist: Luke Thompson made a “dream” of a professional debut as Lysander in the Globe’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream this year. Signed up for the role while he was still an agent-less final-year student at Rada, he revelled in the challenges of this demanding arena. “It’s literally open to the elements, which encourages you as an actor to be quite reactive,” he says, going on to talk fondly of a “pigeon incident” in which a limelight-loving bird stole the show from the four young lovers during their climactic scene. In my review I praised his Lysander “beaming with childlike over-enthusiasm, in a professional debut of some note”.

Thompson, 25, could conceivably have ended up performing on a very different stage, next to Mickey Mouse and his chums, given that his father was an engineer for Disneyland Paris and Thompson grew up outside Paris.

“I used to feel much more comfortable in French than English,” he says. ‘When I spoke English I used to feel blank.”

University in Bristol started to correct this and the future revealed itself when he played Romeo in a promenade version of Romeo and Juliet in Bristol Cathedral. “I thought: this is worth doing. All you need is a group of people and a space.”

The list of parts that Thompson would like to play — Konstantin, Edgar, Romeo again — is long, but for the moment, as he wryly says, “an interesting job would be nice”. That and a piano. “I’m on a mission at the moment to get a piano,” he says. “I used to play loads and I’d love to start that up again.” Perhaps the pigeon would like to join him for a duet.


OLIVIA VINALL

Remembering exactly where she was when she heard that she’d got the part of Desdemona in Othello at the National Theatre, Olivia Vinall says: “It was a couple of days before Christmas last year, the day that

the world was due to end. I was in a Pret A Manger and I was late for a commercial casting for a hair product. I was so excited [when I got the call] and this Italian couple were looking at me like I’d gone mad.” And what about the hair product? “I did go to the casting afterwards. I didn’t get that one,” she pauses. “I’m glad the day went the way it did.”

Vinall, 25, who grew up in Belgium because of her diplomat father’s career, certainly paid her dues prior to her big break (her performance was described by one critic as “truthful, blithe and touching”). For a year and a half after drama school she worked as an usher at the Royal Court (“I must have seen The Faith Machine by Alexi Kaye Campbell about 20 times”), soaking up important lessons about maintaining acting standards show after show. How, though, was she not overwhelmed nightly by the mighty tragedy that befalls Desdemona?

“I found by the end of the play that she still thinks of herself as she is, which is pure and honest and true. That lifted me up to start again.”

Such survival skills will be needed again soon, as Vinall is set to play Cordelia opposite Simon Russell Beale as Lear for Sam Mendes at the National in January. First, though, there’s a flying visit to Hollywood for meetings. “My agent says it’s better to go when you’re busy,” she says happily.

The Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer is named in honour of the late Evening Standard theatre critic. The winner will be announced on Sunday and published in Monday’s paper. Follow The Standard Arts live on Twitter from the awards @thestandardarts

Charles Wintour award for Most Promising Playwright

RACHEL DE-LAHAY

The list of Rachel De-lahay’s current projects is exhausting. Her debut film script, the true story of a “passion crime”, is in development with Film4. She is making a pilot for a BBC online drama and has a commission for the National Theatre. Oh, and her next play, Circles, will be on at the Birmingham Rep next May.

It’s little wonder that De-lahay, 29, who talks in the sparky way that she writes, is in such demand. Routes, her second play for the Royal Court, brought us a bracing burst of multicultural London woven through with immigration issues, as various characters fight to get into this country and others to stay here.


RORY KINNEAR

It’s been a busy Standard Awards season for Rory Kinnear, 35, as he finds himself shortlisted not only for Best Actor, for his role as Iago in the National Theatre’s Othello, but also for his debut play, The Herd, at the Bush Theatre.

“Press night [for The Herd] was traumatic,” he says, “sat as I was surrounded by critics and unable to do anything whatsoever about it.” Yet the enthusiastic critical reaction to the autobiographically inflected piece, about a family struggling to celebrate the 21st birthday of an absent, severely disabled son, made all press night stresses fade away. In between his copious acting commitments — we’ll next see him playing Lord Lucan on ITV next month — he says he is “beginning to make headway” on his next play.


PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE

“There is such hope and fear in people’s eyes when they ask me if it’s autobiographical,” says Phoebe Waller-Bridge of her one-woman play Fleabag, in which she also starred.

“I have to tell them that, sadly, very little of it is.” This may be no bad thing, given that Fleabag, which played to acclaim at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe before transferring to the Soho Theatre, is a scabrously funny account of one disturbed young woman’s misadventures in sex, life and indeed guinea pigs.

Waller-Bridge, 28, is no stranger to the Evening Standard Awards, having previously been longlisted as Outstanding Newcomer for her acting. Her plan now is to both act and write, concentrating on “whatever’s shouting louder at the time”.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Fleabag is in development for television; it should chime perfectly with the sort of audiences who love Peep Show-style metropolitan angst.

The Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright is named after the former editor of the Evening Standard. The three writers shortlisted each receive £1,000

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