This year’s Stage Awards for Acting Excellence were announced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on Sunday.
Patrick O’Kane was named best actor for Quietly at the Traverse, while Robyn Scott won the best actress prize for London Road, Sea Point at Assembly.
Meanwhile best ensemble was awarded to Theatre Ad Infinitum for Ballad of the Burning Star at the Pleasance and Phoebe Waller-Bridge took home the prize for best solo performer for Fleabag at Underbelly.
We spoke to each of our winners to get their reactions:
Best actor: Patrick O’Kane for Quietly at the Traverse
“I am stunned. You never really think about awards and prizes when you make a piece of work. We knew it was a good piece of work and were very happy with it. The creative conversation between the directors, actors and designers was so fluid it felt as though everyone was taking part, so it’s one for the team.
“It was a great privilege to play in this piece, partly because it resonated personally. It is not often that you get that option to play something that you know has a significance beyond the theatre itself. I am from Belfast so the details of that story, although it is a fictional account, draw on events that have happened, so it’s the kind of events you can identify with. We also took the template of a specific pub in Belfast as a model for the design. It is a pub that I am familiar with and my father was too.
“The play kind of transcends any local situation because it is about two people addressing their past in order to deal with their present.”
Best actress: Robyn Scott for London Road, Sea Point, at Assembly
“It is my first time here and also to be nominated in the same category as Dame Janet Suzman, you just think ‘I’m not going to win’. I am so proud of the play – a little, tiny play. It has won numerous awards [in South Africa] as well as for myself and my co-actress Ntombi Makhutshi. Winning this tells us our story is universal and that as an actress I’m doing my job.
“I play an 84-year-old lady so it’s a very long haul for me. It takes me two hours to prepare every day. I haven’t been out once this entire festival.
“Audiences here have absolutely loved it. We were nervous about that. We wondered whether we should take out the South Africanisms but then thought ‘No, we must keep that’.”
Best solo performance: Phoebe Waller-Bridge for Fleabag at Underbelly
“I’m really grateful to the whole team behind Fleabag. It seems silly that it’s a solo performance – you have no idea how much support there is around it.
“Feminism is at its heart. There has been so much of that at this festival. To be at the festival this year as well, with all these amazing women and their work is fantastic. It feels like all the pieces are complex, the arguments are becoming more complicated and it feels like people are presenting the idea of feminism in new ways. I’m lucky to be caught up in that.
“You have no idea when you come up here how people are going to respond. We felt we were really treading the line with this piece. It’s incredibly inspiring and moving for us that people got it and our work has resonated.”
Best ensemble: Theatre Ad Infinitum, directed and written by Nir Paldi, for Ballad of the Burning Star at the Pleasance
Artistic director Nir Paldi said: “With this story, being very political and such a contentious theme, we wanted to find a style that would allow us to convey the complexities of the politics in the Middle East. I thought that with cabaret you can go from very dramatic to comic in seconds and it’s fine.
“We made a decision to bring in specific performers rather than doing a casting. We even brought Seiko [Nakazawa] over with her family from Japan – her child and her mother to babysit the child – I needed people I could trust fully so I could open up about these painful things.
“We’ve been working on it together as an ensemble for a year and I’ve been working on it for three years so it’s the accumulation of a very long and complicated process.”
