THE 2023 UK Theatre Awards, held at the historic Guildhall in central London on Sunday, marked an evening of success for Scotland’s performing arts.
Scottish history play Enough Of Him, by Glasgow-based playwright May Sumbwanyambe, walked off with the award for Best New Play, while Scottish Ballet’s innovative re-imagining of Leo Delibes’s Coppelia received the accolade for Achievement in Dance.
The awards are given annually by the UK Theatre Association (an organisation established in 1894). The prizes, given by a panel of industry professionals, recognise excellence in the theatrical arts across the UK.
Sumbwanyambe’s play succeeded against strong competition. Owen McCafferty’s Agreement (an acclaimed political drama for the Lyric, Belfast that considers the Good Friday Agreement from a humorous and personal perspective) was also nominated.
The nominations in the Best New Play category were completed by Kimber Lee’s celebrated Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play, the Manchester International Festival hit which satirises western culture’s stereotypes of Asian people.
Enough Of Him is based upon the true story of Joseph Knight, an African slave who was brought to Scotland by way of Jamaica, who famously freed himself through the Scottish courts in the late 18th century.
Set in the Perthshire mansion of the slave plantation owner Sir John Wedderburn, it is a powerful work of historical and political theatre-making.
Rather than write a courtroom drama, Sumbwanyambe created a domestic drama in which the stately home becomes a hothouse of racial, sexual and political tensions.
In one particularly remarkable scene, Wedderburn (played with extraordinary emotional power and moral courage by Matthew Pidgeon) finally admits to his wife that his failure to perform his conjugal duties is due to the sadism of his sexual relations with Black slave women in Jamaica.
The play, which was co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and Pitlochry Festival Theatre (above), picked up three prizes in the 2023 Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS), which were held at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in June.
In addition to Best Production of the 2022-23 theatre year, the show also received gongs for Best Director (for Orla O’Loughlin) and Best New Play.
Sumbwanyambe told The National that he was “delighted” that his play had been recognised at the UK Theatre Awards.
“I was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Yorkshire, and I never got to see a play like this when I was growing up,” he said.
“Obviously, the play’s already been recognised here in Scotland,” he added, referring to Enough of Him’s three CATS awards. “For it to get this recognition at the UK Theatre Awards is more than an accolade for my play, it’s also recognition of all of the great work that goes on in theatre north of the Border.”
The play’s latest prize comes at a particularly good moment, the dramatist said, given that a tour of Scotland and England is currently being planned.
Scottish Ballet’s Coppélia – which transforms the famous tale of the animated doll into a powerful contemplation of artificial intelligence – wowed audiences at the 2022 Edinburgh International Festival. Its accolade at the UK Theatre Awards comes on top of considerable recognition at the 2023 National Dance Awards (which award dance excellence throughout the UK).
At those awards – which were held at the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill,held in London in June – Coppélia received the prizes for Best Classical Choreography (for choreographers Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple, aka Jess and Morgs) and Outstanding Female Classical Performance (for Constance Devernay-Laurence as Swanhilda). Scottish Ballet also walked off with the Stef Stefanou Award for Outstanding Company.
In Jess and Morgs’s version of the ballet, the lovable toymaker Dr Coppelius is transformed, as I observed in my review for the Sunday National, into a “Zuckerbergian character [who] has a capacity for technological innovation that is well in advance of his moral integrity.
“In one voiced-over section of the ballet, we learn that he considers his company’s social responsibility to extend no further than abiding reluctantly by employment law and delivering dividends to his shareholders.”
The imagination and ambition of the production enabled it to see off the challenge of major works at the UK Theatre Awards – Ballet Rambert were fellow nominees for their screen-to-dance adaptation Peaky Blinders: The Redemption Of Thomas Shelby.
The final nominees were Jo Fong and George Orange for their much-loved piece The Rest Of Our Lives, in which ageing cabaret artistes consider their future through the prism of their creative past. It speaks volumes about Scottish Ballet’s achievement that their Coppélia won out in such illustrious company.
The awards for both Enough Of Him and Coppélia come at a difficult time for the arts in Scotland, which are still reeling from the recent re-imposition of the Scottish Government’s £6.6 million cut in the budget of arts funding body Creative Scotland.
