Plays and Players 1968 Awards

• Best Set: Boris Aronson for Cabaret
• Best Production: Peter Gill’s direction of the D. H. Lawrence Plays
• Most Promising Actress: Angela Pleasence in The Ha-ha
• Most Promising Actor: Barrie Rutter in The Apprentices
• Best Performance (Actress): Jill Bennett in Time Present
• Best Performance (Actor): Alec McCowen as Hadrian VII
• Best New Musical: Cabaret
• Best New Play: John Osborne The Hotel in Amsterdam
• Notes on the year, and their votes, from each of the critics
  • Picks from Felix Barker (London Evening News): mentions the departure of the Lord Chamberlain, Blue Comedy, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Hair, Spitting Image, The Beard, Hochhuth’s Soldiers, Alan Bennett’s 40 Years On, Osborne The Hotel in Amsterdam, Time Present, Franco Colavecchia’s set for Cellini
  • Picks from Ronald Bryden (The Observer): mentions Edward Bond’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Frank Marcus Mrs Mouse, Are You Within?; Alec McCowen in Hadrian VII, Peter Gill’s D. H. Lawrence Trilogy, John Osborne’s Time Present and Hotel in Amsterdam (For the Mean Time); John Arden The Hero Rises Up, the departure of the Lord Chamberlain.
  • Picks from Harold Hobson (The Sunday Times): John Osborne, ‘The RSC has been disputable, and the National Theatre not (unfortunately)’. Oxford Playhouse under Frank Hauser, Nottingham under Stuart Burge. “A want of new dramatists”. Peter Barnes The Ruling Class. “Ian McKellen has confirmed his position of pre-eminence among younger actors”.
  • Philip Hope-Wallace (The Guardian): A poor year
  • Jeremy Kingston (Punch)
  • Herbert Kretzmer (Daily Express): “Hair was not so much a musical as a bandwagon and God knows it wasn’t short of passengers”. The arrival and consoldiation of the off-West End theatre; Mr Marowitz and his colleagues.
  • Peter Lewis (Daily Mail)
  • Frank Marcus (Sunday Telegraph)
  • David Nathan (The Sun)
  • Benedict Nightingale (New Statesman): The unjustly derided The Beard
  • Peter Roberts (plays and Players): “1968 was very much a Stars and Stripes year”, “Difficult to decide whether the National’s autumn productions of Home and Beauty and The Advertisement were vehicles or hearses for the talents …”
  • Milton Shulman (London Evening Standard)
  • Hilary Spurling (Spectator): Peter Brook Oedipus and Brecht Edward II: “suggest that the National Theatre is not entirely indifferent to this new mood of excitement sweeping the contemporary theatre”, RSC richest World Theatre season to date
  • JC Trewin (Illustrated London News): Leonard Rossiter’s Arturo Ui at Edinburgh  [sic]
  • Irving Wardle (The Times)
  • B A Young (Financial Times)

• New books
  • Robert Donat by JC Trewin
  • The Theatre of Commitment by Eric Bentley
  • Gordon Craig by Edward Craig
  • Bernard Shaw: Our Theatre in the Nineties by Harold Fromm
• Directors in interview no. 4: Ed Berman (American producer)
• Review not listed separately:
  • How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear one man-programme on the life and work of Edward Lear by Charles Lewsen at Hampstead Theatre Club
  • There Was A Man one-man programme on Robert Burns, written by Tom Wright, at the Arts: “Unlike so many one-man shows, There Was a Man is almost a good play too.”
• Green Room (Helen Dawson): Marowitz, Arts Council, British Council setbacks due to Nigerian war

Newsletters from Europe

• Moscow (Sheridan Morley)
• Paris (Augy Hayter)
• Amsterdam (Adrian Brine)