“It’s very charming to be recognised,” says Sir Stephen Fry, reclining on a sofa in a quiet moment before the 2025 London Standard Theatre Awards, where he received the award for comedy from Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev. The accolade was for Fry’s appearance as Lady Bracknell in the West End transfer of the National Theatre production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. It was also an acknowledgment of the decades of laughter Fry, 68, has generated as an actor, writer, presenter, comedian and our most prominent public intellectual. He was asked to propose a toast at the start of the awards dinner and duly delivered a witty, heartfelt speech, entirely off the cuff.
Given his packed polymath’s schedule, Fry’s theatre roles have been few and far between: the last was as Malvolio in Twelfth Night in 2012, in a production that transferred from Shakespeare’s Globe to the West End and Broadway, where he was nominated for a Tony. His stage appearances are all the more hotly anticipated for being rare. He was lured back for Lady Bracknell because, as a Wilde aficionado, it felt “like closing a circle”.
