THE eighth annual CATS, for the year 2009–10, were announced at 3pm on Sunday June 13 in a ceremony at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. The special guest presenters were actor Karen Dunbar and EIF artistic director Jonathan Mills. Music was provided by the Jazz Bar Quartet, food was courtesy of Appetite Direct and wine thanks to Inverarity One to One. Programmes were designed and printed by The List. More pictures of the event are here,
Best Male Performance
Sponsored by Guy Robertson Partnership
Kevin Lennon as John Merrick, The Elephant Man, Dundee Rep
“IT’S easy for an actor to elicit audience sympathy when playing the grotesque, but without recourse either to overpowering prosthetics or a set of method acting tics, Kevin Lennon transformed the title role of The Elephant Man into a sad but dignified figure. Lennon’s Merrick is a natural wallflower, a mature and tender study of human frailty and artistic and intellectual sensibilities that are played with an understated but all too real sense of the man behind what most presumed to be a monster.”
Best Female Performance
Sponsored by STV
Sian Thomas as Stevie, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Traverse Theatre
“SIAN Thomas’s performance as the brutally cuckolded Stevie achieved, like Albee’s play itself, something truly unlikely and paradoxical, namely to be, simultaneously, grotesquely comic and genuinely, powerfully tragic. At the moment when her character’s husband, Martin, compares his love for a goat to their loving marriage, she expresses the shuddering pain and rage of a latter day Medea.”
Best Ensemble
Huxley’s Lab, Grid Iron/Lung Ha’s
“HUXLEY’S lab was an adroitly pitched production which not only contained consistent and strong performances from every member of the ensemble, but used the different strengths of each actor to help tell its story. From big crowd scenes, to site-specific set pieces and interactive moments in the promenade performance, every single performer helped maintain the audience’s belief in the truth of this immersive piece of work.”
Best Director
Jemima Levick, The Elephant Man, Dundee Rep
“IN a year filled with excellent directional concepts, Jemima Levick’s work on Dundee Rep’s The Elephant Man was the notable stand-out. With elaborate detail to style and atmosphere, Levick not only directed a remarkable production but also created a tapestry of arresting images that added depth to each performance, along with the overall plot. The result was an impressive mixture of artistry and confidence filled with imagination and poignancy.”
Best Design
Alex Lowde (set) and Colin Grenfell (lighting), The Elephant Man, Dundee Rep
“DESIGNER Alex Lowde has created a perfect set, dark and foreboding as the story it supports, with its vast metallic structure filling the stage. Its walkways echo the constant footfall of an institution, framing the golden hazy curtains which open and close round Merrick’s hospital room cum gilded cage.”
Best Music and Sound
Alasdair Macrae, The Government Inspector, Communicado/Tron Theatre
“The nominations for Best Use of Music and Sound demonstrate the diversity of approaches within contemporary Scottish theatre. From a unique take on the musical to a thirteen hour promenade performance, Scottish companies have displayed the range of ways in which music is often at the core of the theatrical experience. Alasdair Macrae, in the Government Inspector, led the cast in a series of musical interludes that added to the play’s atmosphere of Russian corruption and jovial comedy. The cast revealed their musical skills with casual ease: while Macrae managed to find the perfect accompaniment to this feel-good satire
Best Technical Presentation
Sponsored by Northern Light
Jane Eyre, Perth Theatre
“FOR sheer controlled discipline on a conventional stage, managing a complex two-tier set, aerial work, dance work, wandering musicians and the most convincing collapsing set I can remember, when Rochester’s Gothic pile at Thornfield Hall burns down, Perth Theatre’s back stage team did a brilliant job.”
Best Production for Children and Young People
Mr Write, National Theatre of Scotland
“ROB Drummond’s Mr Write – part of a three-play, teen-friendly package staged by the National Theatre of Scotland – really went out on a bold limb by using unscripted material from the young audience to create an instant drama. If ever there was a way to make theatre relevant to teenagers, this surely was it – it had their input at its very heart.”
Best New Play
Sponsored by W&P Longreach – Theatre Insurance Brokers
Ursula Rani Sarma, The Dark Things, Traverse Theatre
“URUSLA Rani Sarma’s The Dark Things is a thrilling new play for our time that deals with vital themes of voyeurism, sensationalism, and sexual confusion in contemporary society, and does it by developing both a powerful, fractured narrative and a series of unforgettable characters. It’s the sort of play that takes courage both to write and to perform, and Dominic Hill’s Traverse production was superb in every way, illuminated by a range of performances that did full justice to a wonderful, complex and disturbing play.”
Best Production
The Dark Things, Traverse Theatre
“THE Dark Things presented not only an arresting script by Ursula Rani Sarma about the alienation of a cruel world, but also a strikingly good set of performances, great design and forceful direction by Dominic Hill. It wins the award for Best Production against formidable competition, not least from the Traverse Theatre itself.”
