No fringe benefits: the 2026 Oliver Awards
Last year I wrote a rather curmudgeonly piece about the 2025 Olivier Awards. What was especially disappointing about them, I wrote, was how much they were dominated by the West End, especially musicals. Fringe theatre was largely ignored. Last Sunday’s 2026 Olivier Awards tell the same old story.
Once again, some of the best plays I have seen in the past year have appeared at small theatres like The Southwark Playhouse and The Park Theatre. Kenneth Tigar gave a brilliant performance in a one-man show, The Happiest Man on Earth, as the Auschwitz survivor, Eddie Jaku, and deserved his standing ovation from a packed house. Farewell, Mr. Haffmann, at The Park Theatre, is set in occupied Paris, is full of twists and turns and menace, and beautifully performed by a small cast. The Finborough Theatre in Earls Court staged the world premiere of a new adaptation of The Passenger by Nadya Menuhin, based on the bestselling novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz and directed by multi-award-winning former artistic director of The Young Vic, Tim Supple, for five weeks from 10 February–15 March 2025. Perhaps best of all was another one-man show, this time at Riverside Studios, Second Best starring Asa Butterfield, best known from the TV series, Sex Education. It was his stage debut and was an absolute tour de force playing to packed houses.
Sorry to be predictable, but here we go again. 12 of the 24 awards this year went to musicals – 7 to Paddington, 2 to Evita, 2 to Sondheim’s classic, Into the Woods and 1 to Chris Fenwick (Musical Supervision & Arrangements) & Sean Hayes (Live Piano Performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue) for Good Night, Oscar. As well as Sondheim, there were also 2 awards for All My Sons (though sadly not for Bryan Cranston) and 1 for The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.
Obviously, I don’t have anything against Sondheim, Miller or Tennessee Williams. My concerns are twofold. First, the West End is becoming increasingly expensive. Producers cast one or two major stars (Cranston, Mark Srong and Lesley Manville in Oedipus, John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in Giant, Ian McKellen as a superb Falstaff) and charge a small fortune, close to £150 a ticket.
Second, the dominance of the Oliviers by West End productions (22 out of 24 awards went to West End productions) means that small fringe theatres get squeezed out. This isn’t just about quality. Musicals and revivals are fine, but what about enterprising small theatres like the Arcola Theatre near Dalston Kingsland, the Marylebone Theatre near Baker Street, The Rose Theatre in Kingston, Stratford East, The Southwark Theatre (which launched Operation Mincemeat one of the great successes of recent years), and The Riverside? These have all put on terrific productions in 2026: Ukraine Unbroken (five plays about the terrible war in Ukraine at the Arcola), two terrific productions at The Marylebone Theatre, The Wanderers and Yentl (a bi-lingual production at part-English and part-Yiddish, much close to the original story by Isaac Bashevis Singer than the Barbra Streisand film) and Here There Are Blueberries at Stratford East.
Only two Olivier awards went to fringe theatres this year: The Glass Menagerie at the Yard Theatre and a children’s play (awarded for Best Faily Show) at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. Needless to say, fringe theatres can’t afford household names or big-cast musicals. But they are inventive and imaginative and cast their nets wide, from Ukraine to Auschwitz, or last year, from Paris during the Occupation to a one-man show about someone who auditioned to play Harry Potter.
Do we really need so many awards going to West End shows and musicals? Is it not possible to give more recognition to smaller theatres and to regional theatres, to quirkier productions? It was wonderful that Operation Mincemeat, which started at the Southwark Playhouse and then transferred to the Riverside, then moved to the West End, where it is still running, and, triumphantly, to Broadway. It deserved its huge success. But so did some of these smaller, innovative productions that played briefly on the fringe.
One other omission, this year and last, are the great subsidised theatres, the National, The Old Vic and the Barbican, among them. The Old Vic put on a terrific production of Miller’s last great play, Broken Glass, and the Barbican revived a terrific production of The Fiddler on the Roof to a packed house last year. None of them have fared well at the Oliviers. The National, sadly, is going through something of a slump since the golden age of Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hytner.
I hope things will improve over the coming year. In the meantime, I will wave the flag for small theatres, innovative productions and (but this is another story) a better generation of theatre critics.
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