Reflecting on the Olivier Awards 2025

This year's Olivier Awards ceremony celebrated the power of theatre to buoy audiences during challenging times — as well as offering some humorous moments between stars.

This year’s Olivier Awards winners have by now been clocked, but we all know that a roll call of recipients forms only one part of such occasions.

Of equal note at this year’s ceremony was an unusual generosity of spirit, coupled with a prevailing eloquence, that set in early and continued pretty well all the way through. Co-hosts Beverley Knight and Billy Porter were determined to keep the mood upbeat, and one winner after another went even further, suggesting art as the best antidote to challenging times, and finding beautiful, and sometimes funny, ways to say just that.

There was no doubt, for instance, that Elliot Levey was thrilled to have followed up his 2022 Olivier for Cabaret with a second win, this time for playing the late publisher Tom Maschler in Giant (Levey was also nominated two years ago for the revival of the play Good.) But I don’t think anyone anticipated the fun he would have at the podium, recounting his backstage pursuit of the game Botticelli with leading man, John Lithgow, and describing his author, Mark Rosenblatt, and director, Nicholas Hytner, as a new — and certainly desirable — three-named firm of chartered accountants: Rosen, Blatt, and Hytner.

The Giant winners were a surpassingly gracious crew. The 79-year-old Lithgow spoke movingly of seeing Olivier play the Captain in Strindberg’s Dance of Death at the Old Vic during the American actor’s student days at LAMDA, only to find himself holding a trophy a half-century or more later named for the actor-knight.

Rosenblatt acknowledged his newfound career as an accountant, pausing to give serious thanks to the two theatre veterans, legends in their own way both, who had made this fledgling playwright’s work ring out with such force. All three men seemed pleased that a play containing “hate grenades” was nonetheless recognised for its capacity for nuance, which itself bodes well for the Roald Dahl drama's imminent transfer to the West End and from there, one assumes, to Broadway – Lithgow’s home turf.

Emotions ran high. Layton Williams was exultant, and then some, at his Best Supporting Actor in a Musical prize for Titanique, astonished to find himself having won an Olivier “for playing an iceberg”.

Lesley Manville seemed momentarily weak-kneed as she accepted best actress for her brilliant work in Robert Icke’s Oedipus from presenter Tom Hiddleston. “You’re quite nice, Tom, actually,” she told the crowd, before adding deadpan, “I’m single” – the Oliviers as dating service, and why not? One only wondered how Manville missed a chance to call out fellow nominee Indira Varma, who was in contention for playing the exact same role in a different Old Vic production of the same title – especially since the two women were visibly engrossed in conversation beforehand on the red carpet.

Many was the winner who had been in this position before – Imelda Staunton picked up her fifth Olivier for last summer’s revival of Hello, Dolly! But this was surely the first time she was able to pay tribute to her late mother, Bridie, in connection to Staunton’s own daughter, Bessie Carter, whom she will appear opposite in a West End revival next month of Mrs Warren’s Profession: if only the young actress’s grandmother, Staunton said movingly from the stage, could see the career her granddaughter has forged.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s John Dagleish copped a second Olivier a decade after he had won previously for the Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon. Back then, he said, his plus-one had been his mum; since then, she had died and he accepted the prize in her memory, while at the same time boasting a lovely plus-one in Aimie Atkinson, the West End star of Six and Pretty Woman.

The presenters’ banter for the most part landed far better than is the norm at such events: Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Jane Krakowski – American visitors, both – made comic hay of the title of the Stephen Sondheim musical, Here We Are, that brings them to the National Theatre this month. And the response that greeted Dames Elaine Paige and Jacqueline Wilson as they stepped up to the podium visibly took these venerated talents by surprise.

And whereas musicals can sometimes seem diminished by performance excerpts seen out of context at such gatherings, that was not the case here. The bottle dance from the Barbican-bound Fiddler on the Roof – the winner of three Oliviers, including Musical Revival – was astonishing in its vivacity, speed, and balance, and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812’s trophied Maimuna Memon proved as scorching a Sonya in the sizable confines of the Albert Hall as she was this past winter within the intimate Donmar. (I was seated alongside the Natasha Pierre contingent, who made for enthusiastic company.)

In a class by himself was nominee Simon Lipkin, who fresh from that day’s Oliver! matinee delivered once again the most thrilling imaginable “Reviewing the Situation”, Fagin’s climactic number. Vocally and physically deft, Lipkin sent a musical theatre standard right into the stratosphere, as he had on Shaftesbury Avenue back in January. Reviewing his “Situation”, one had to conclude that five stars seems way too few.

Book tickets to Olivier Award-winning shows on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Olivier Awards 2025 (photo by Pamela Raith). Inset: Giant, Titanique (photos courtesy of productions), the cast of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Simon Lipkin (photos by Danny Kaan).