Now I don’t normally go in for this sort of thing. But being a proud employee of the Young Vic building I wanted to see the appreciation they rightly deserve, and I ended up watching the whole of ITV coverage of the Olivier awards ceremony.

There was a lot of people thanking themselves for being great and having the best friends. But there were a few standout moments for me.
One massive highlight was David Lan’s (artistic director of the Young Vic) acceptance speech (for A View From The Bridge – best revival), he said

‘I travel quite a lot and wherever I go, I meet people who say to me “Oh you’re David Lan, I hear you run the best theatre in London.” And I say, London is one of the great capital cities of the world. I’m perfectly happy to say I run the best theatre in Waterloo.’

And looking at the number of awards the Young Vic won, it would be hard to argue against it! Not to mention all the excellent work they do that is maybe not as obvious on the surface.

But a couple of other people actually made acceptance speeches that I thought meant something more the usual self congratulation and said something useful.

Sticking with the Young Vic theme, I really liked the sentiment of Mark Strong’s acceptance speech for best actor for his part in A View From the Bridge. As well as all the usual thanks he said that what amazed him about this show was:

‘The young people that came to see it who all wanted to talk about what they were seeing […] all wanted to discuss what the characters were doing on stage, why they were doing it, whether they they agreed with them, how they felt about what they were doing, who they trusted. And that made me realise that thousands of years have gone by and we still have this thing called live theatre; and the reason is that we need to be able to compare ourselves to what we’re seeing up there, judge ourselves as human beings, decide what’s right, what’s wrong, who we are, why we’re here. That’s the point of theatre.’

Also Ray Davies of The Kinks receiving an award for his outstanding achievement in music award shared this bit of advice

‘I think when you write songs you write about people. I know we’ve got fancy dramatists and amazing people here. But without people we have no plays, we have no films. And people are the source of my material. So the next time you’re sitting in a park somewhere and you see someone like me, looking at you, don’t phone the police.’

So keep staring, keep challenging audiences, and keep comparing yourselves to them up there.

The whole of the awards ceremony is available on ITV Player just click here to watch it, if you can put up with all the adverts, and see the relevant minutes below:

David Lan – 7:09
Mark Strong – 22:40
Ray Davies 1:23:15