Another year of celebration as the Critics Awards for Theatre Scotland announce their newest crop of winners amongst the deserving nominees, which continue to champion the talent and ingenuity of Scottish Theatre.
This year, a special award goes to John MCGrath’s The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, celebrating its 50th anniversary. It is also the first time a CATS Whiskers was presented to a single production.
With the removal of binary best performance awards, David Hayman and Sally Reid receive Outstanding Performance awards for their performances in Cyprus Avenue and Shirley Valentine.
Continuing the tremendous wins for the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in a co-production with the National Theatre Scotland, May Sumbwanyambe’s Enough of Him wins Best New Play, Best Director and Best Production. While Love Beyond (Act of Remembrance) is recognised in two categories: Best Technical and Best Music.
The full list of winners may be found below, with quotes from each of the categories’ announcers as to the successes of the winner. A link to our review for each of the winning productions may also be found below.
Here’s to another year of world-leading theatre produced in Scotland.
This year’s awards ceremony was held at the Traverse Theatre as part of their 60th-anniversary celebration.
Presenters of the 2023 Awards were River City actor and celebrated panto villain Grant Stott, and BAFTA-award-winning actor Shauna MacDonald.
CATS Whiskers
The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil
“As we recognise the impact of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil on Scottish theatre over the last 50 years, it is fervently to be hoped that Scottish theatre will continue to be as vibrant and challenging over the next half century, continuing to hold up a mirror to society whilst also celebrating all that is special about Scotland.” – Joyce McMillan
Outstanding Performance:
Sally Reid
Shirley Valentine, in Shirley Valentine, Pitlochry Festival Theatre
“In Elizabeth Newman’s captivating production of the Willy Russell monologue, Sally Reid made it feel like she was chatting to each of us individually. Alone on the stage, she made the big Pitlochry auditorium seem as intimate as her kitchen. With a downbeat wit, she played Shirley Valentine, the neglected Liverpool housewife, with charm, humour and a sparkle in her eye. She earned big laughs, but it was her unaffected honesty and emotional truth that made this a masterclass in acting.” – Mark Fisher
David Hayman
Eric in Tron Theatre production of Cyprus Avenue, Tron Theatre
“Cyprus Avenue stands or falls on the central performance. We have to believe in Eric’s unshakeable knowledge that his new granddaughter is Gerry Adams. We also have to believe in his Ulster provenance – it must feel bone-deep, not sprayed on. David Hayman delivered on both in a performance that was funny, moving and terrifying in equal measures.” – Anna Burnside
Best Ensemble:
Castle Lennox
A Royal Lyceum Theatre and Lung Ha Theatre co-production
“Castle Lennox, saw possibly the most brilliantly diverse cast on any stage this year bringing a complex play about a truly shameful element of Scotland’s social history to light. Lung Ha always create work which impresses but this production, which we have had to wait so many years to see, took their unique method of using an all-professional cast of people with and without learning disabilities to a new level with a production that was frequently funny as well as utterly heartbreaking.” – Thom Dibdin
Best Director:
Enough of Him
Enough of Him, a National Theatre of Scotland and Pitlochry Festival Theatre co-production
“Appropriately for a four-hander, May Sumbwanyambe’s subtle and slippery play was directed by Orla O’Loughlin as if it were a square dance. It was about Joseph Knight, a real-life black slave brought from Jamaica to 18th-century Perthshire and was compellingly staged by the National Theatre of Scotland and Pitlochry Festival Theatre. O’Loughlin set a steady pace, giving the actors time to establish the codes and conventions that held the characters in check, drawing forth nuanced and complex performances from Omar Austin, Matthew Pidgeon, Rachael-Rose McLaren and Catriona Faint, on a set by Fred Meller that captured the contradictions of colonialism.” – Mark Fisher
Best Design:
Tom Piper (Set Design) Alex Berry (Costume Design /Associate Set Designer) and Lizzie Powell (Lighting Design)
Macbeth (an undoing), a Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh Production
“In Macbeth (an undoing), Alex Berry’s array of fabulous costumes brought the production into the early 20th century, Tom Piper’s perspective-altering, mirrored flats showed the many sides of Lady Macbeth while the chiaroscuro effect of Lizzie Powell’s lighting gave the whole piece depth. It was the show in which, more than any other, the design helped create the tension, dynamism and rhythm of the whole piece.” – Thom Dibdin
Best Use of Sound and Music:
David Paul Jones
Love Beyond (Act of Remembrance), a Ramesh Meyyapan, Raw Material and Vanishing Point co-production
“For Love Beyond, David Paul Jones created a score that was beautifully attuned to the show’s themes of love, loss and memory, and to the situation of the play’s protagonist Old Harry, who is deaf and suffering with dementia. It was absolutely central to a show that was in many ways a mood poem – the music leads us straight into the surges of thought and emotion in Harry’s mind that cannot be expressed in words.” – Anna Burnside
Best Technical:
Love Beyond (Act of Remembrance)
Ramesh Meyyapan, Raw Material and Vanishing Point co-production
“Love Beyond (Act of Remembrance) combines tremendous depths of emotion with sheer technical brilliance to depict the themes of love, loss, dementia and communication. Brilliant acting, direction, writing and design were all brought together through the flawless technical execution of a beautifully poignant production that was far more than simple ‘smoke and mirrors’.” – Michael Cox
Best Production for Children and Young People:
“The Gift is an inspiring tale which ignites an earnest sense of playfulness, encouraging children, their families, and audiences to appreciate new ways of exploring thought and creativity. A firm reminder from Barrowland Ballet and Capital Theatre of the value of imagination.” – Dominic Corr
Best New Play :
Enough of Him by May Sumbwanyambe
A National Theatre of Scotland and Pitlochry Festival Theatre co-production
“May Sumbwanyambe’s Enough of Him is an extraordinary piece about the African slave Joseph Knight and his famously successful bid to achieve his freedom through the Scottish courts. In the play, the Hell on Earth that was the slave colony of Jamaica crashes into the concocted gentility of the Scottish landowning classes. The drama imagines, with extraordinary power, the contorted racial, class and sexual politics that must have consumed Ballindean, the Perthshire mansion of Knight’s nominal ‘master’, the slave-plantation owner Sir John Wedderburn.” – Mark Brown
Best Production:
Enough of Him
A National Theatre of Scotland and Pitlochry Festival Theatre co-production
“Enough Of Him was a stunningly powerful and beautifully realised show, with a magnificent text by May Sumbwanyambe, which made – and I hope will continue to make – a vital contribution to the evolving debate about Scotland’s historic involvement with the slave trade. In a magnificently detailed and beautifully paced production by Orla O’Loughlin, it explored these themes through the relationship between the enslaved man, Joseph Knight, and Sir John Wedderburn, who brought Knight back to Scotland as a servant at his Perthshire estate, and treated him as a favourite. The show was co-produced by Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland, and featured superb design and music, as well as outstanding performances from Omar Austin and Matthew Pidgeon, as two men whose fractured and unequal relationship bears witness to the horror of slavery, and the damage and distortion it has inflicted, down the generations, on those whose lives were shaped by it.” – Joyce McMillan
