And we’re back. Founded in 1955, the Evening Standard Theatre Awards are the UK’s oldest dramatic accolades, an annual recognition by London’s newspaper of the excellence of London’s theatre. Across seven decades, the awards honoured the great and the good both on and off stage in acting, writing, musical performance, direction and design. Their history is a roll call of established and upcoming talent, from Richard Burton to Andrew Scott, Vanessa Redgrave to Billie Piper, Samuel Beckett — whose Waiting for Godot was named “Most Controversial Play” in 1955 — to 2019 winner Lynn Nottage.
Then the whole world stopped. As the Standard’s theatre critic I sat down on March 13, 2020 with nearly 900 other people to watch Robert Lepage’s all-day epic The Seven Streams of the River Ota at the National Theatre. Three days later London’s playhouses were closed for the first time since the plague of 1592 in Shakespeare’s day. The industry was among those hardest hit by lockdown.
