Paul Mescal, Nicole Scherzinger, Patsy Ferran and Paapa Essiedu are among the “treasures” of the London stage shortlisted for this year’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
The Irish star, who shot to fame in Normal People, is shortlisted for best actor for his performance as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. Two of his co-stars — Anjana Vasan and Ferran — are on the shortlist for the Natasha Richardson Award for best actress, given in association with Mithridate.
Mescal faces competition from Andrew Scott, who previously won the best actor award in 2019 and is now shortlisted for his one-man show Vanya, as well as Essiedu for his performance in The Effect, and Mark Gatiss for his portrayal of Sir John Gielgud in The Motive and the Cue.
The shortlist for the best actress award is completed by Rachael Stirling for her performance as Amanda in the Donmar Warehouse production of Private Lives, and Sophie Okonedo for the title role in Medea at @sohoplace.
Also in the running at this year’s awards is Scherzinger, who wowed critics with her performance as ageing actress Norma Desmond in the newly opened Sunset Boulevard.
She is nominated for best musical performance along with Charlie Stemp in Crazy for You, Kyle Ramar Freeman in A Strange Loop and Marisha Wallace in Guys & Dolls.
The Bridge Theatre’s revival of the classic show is also nominated in four other categories, including best musical and best director.
The other nominees for best musical are Standing at the Sky’s Edge at the National Theatre, A Strange Loop at the Barbican Theatre and Tammy Faye at the Almeida Theatre.
James Graham’s Dear England at the National, about football manager Gareth Southgate, is shortlisted for best play alongside Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue, which also ran at the National, Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror from the Almeida in Islington and Ryan Calais Cameron’s Retrogade from Kilburn’s Kiln Theatre.
Dear England’s director Rupert Goold is shortlisted for the Milton Shulman Award for best director along with Rebecca Frecknall for A Streetcar Named Desire, Nicholas Hytner for Guys & Dolls and Jamie Lloyd for Sunset Boulevard.
The Bush Theatre enhances its reputation for new writing with two out of four nominations in the Charles Wintour Award for most promising playwright category, for Anoushka Lucas’s Elephant and Matilda Feyisayo Ibini’s Sleepova while Kimber Lee’s untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play at the Young Vic Theatreâ¯and Isley Lynn’s The Swell at the Orange Tree Theatre also get the nod.
The emerging talent category is between Andrew Richardson, who made his theatrical debut in Guys & Dolls, Taylor Russell for her performance in The Effect, Jack Wolfe in Next to Normal and Tatenda Shamiso in NO I.D.
Best design will be a contest between Bunny Christie, shortlisted for Guys & Dolls, Robert Jones for Dancing at Lughnasa at the National, Georgia Lowe for The Good Person of Szechwan at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre and Tom Pye for My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican.
Previous winners of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, which began in 1955, include Dame Judi Dench, Sir Laurence Olivier, Nicole Kidman, Jodie Comer and Tom Hiddleston.
The Standard’s Culture Editor Nancy Durrant, who chaired the judging panel, said: “It’s been a hell of a year for theatre in London, and in whittling its treasures down to this dazzling shortlist, the judges had both an unenviable task in that there was so much to see, and a deeply enviable one in that there was so much to see, and they got to see it.”
The winners will be announced on November 19 at an awards ceremony at
Claridge’s hosted by this newspaper’s proprietor Lord Lebedev, alongside co-hosts David Harewood, Vanessa Kirby, Ian McKellen, Sienna Miller and this year’s presenter Susan Wokoma.
