A year on: catch up with the winners of The Stage Debut Awards 2019

During lockdown SpitLip, the theatre company comprising David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoe Roberts, has been busy. The company won the award for best composer or lyricist for Operation Mincemeat at London’s New Diorama Theatre. “Because it was our first musical, we’ve used this time to make links with other musical theatremakers,” Cumming says.

They are currently working with 20 musical theatremakers for a digital project. “That’s really exciting and extremely collaborative. We want to see if you have an ‘Avengers Assemble’ of lots of musicians and writers, whether it can create anything, or maybe it’ll be a glorious mess.”

Cumming says the company was on “cloud nine” at winning the award, and the effect has been positive. “Without naming names, we had responses to emails from people who had been ignoring us for two years,” he says. “It very much opened doors and led to many more conversations with people who otherwise wouldn’t reply.”

Operation Mincemeat was lined up for a run at Southwark Playhouse before heading to Edinburgh. When that fell apart SpitLip spent the first month of lockdown focusing on rewrites. “In some ways, it made us take stock,” Cumming says. “Every song has had a shift in it. We’ve now got it as far as it can go.”

Last year, Jasmine Lee-Jones won the Alfred Fagon Award, the Evening Standard Theatre Award for most promising playwright and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for most promising playwright. Her play Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner was nominated at the Oliviers for outstanding achievement in affiliate theatre.

“The Stage Debut Awards was the first award show I attended and it will remain fondly in my remembrances,” Lee-Jones says. “It’s a fantastic celebration of people both new and seasoned in the industry trying out terrains previously unattempted.”

‘Winning the award opened doors and led to conversations with people who otherwise wouldn’t reply’ – SpitLip’s David Cumming

As for what she did next, the playwright continues: “Since then, I’ve been developing various creative projects and working on my creative and spiritual growth the latter of which has been a huge help in lockdown.”

Evie Gurney, who won best designer for her costumes on Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre and The Hunt at London’s Almeida, has been able to keep working during shutdown. “I’m lucky that I’ve been relatively unscathed,” she says. She is flying to Stockholm at the end of this month for a production of The Seagull directed by Lyndsey Turner, due to open in November. “We have to work one metre apart, which will be strange for costume fittings.”

She is also working on the opera Lear, by Aribert Reimann, at the Staatsoper in Hannover. Directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, it is due to open next year. This came after a production of Much Ado About Nothing for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington – whose artistic director, Simon Godwin, directed Antony and Cleopatra – was postponed to 2021.

Gurney, who came from the world of fashion, says the move into theatre is going well. “I couldn’t have planned my life like this but things fell into place in a particular way.” Of the Debut win, she says: “It was extraordinary to be noticed in that way and welcomed into the theatre industry with an award like that.”

Jamal Ajala, who won best actor in a play for Ear for Eye at London’s Royal Court, says he was excited to be at the awards. “I didn’t really think I would win anything,” he says. “As my name was read out, my heart leapt. It was such a great honour to win such an award and at such a prestigious event. I shall never forget it.” Another enjoyable part of the night was the camaraderie and atmosphere at the event. “I was so pleased to be in wonderful company with such great talents.”

Since the ceremony he has been approached about working on a number of projects, and he hopes to reveal more about them in the coming months. He has also been working during lockdown and while he can’t say much at the moment “there will be revelations in a little while”.

Adam Hugill was perhaps most surprised at winning best actor in a musical for his role in Standing at the Sky’s Edge at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. “I’d just graduated and wasn’t a musical theatre sort of person,” he says. “I had only played a German singing about a pineapple in Cabaret at drama school. That was the extent of my musical theatre experience so I was shocked to win.”

He had already landed a job for which he headed to South Africa for six months just four days after the ceremony. It was for a show called The Watch, based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. The production closed due to Covid-19 with six days of filming left, though filming is preparing to restart on a socially distanced set. He was supposed to return in the acclaimed Standing at the Sky’s Edge at the Crucible in December, which would then head to the National Theatre, but everything is currently on hold.

Designer Frankie Bradshaw and director Lynette Linton won the award for best creative West End debut for Sweat at the Donmar Warehouse, which then transferred to the Gielgud. “It was so lovely to be nominated as a pair, we both really appreciated that,” Bradshaw says. “It really celebrated the fact that you don’t do this alone. I love the idea that you can celebrate other partnerships in the process too.”

Bradshaw “managed to fit in bits and bobs” before lockdown including a production of Two Trains Running for English Touring Theatre, the Lyric Hammersmith’s pantomime Cinderella and A Christmas Carol for Theatr Clwyd. She was working on a production of Hamlet touring to primary schools, which was about to open in the Dorfman at the National when lockdown hit.

‘It was lovely to be nominated as a pair – it celebrated that you don’t do this alone’ Frankie Bradshaw

Bradshaw and Linton were also gearing up for a show at the NT and had been about to go on a research trip to Harlem when it was pulled. “I hope that will still happen,” the designer says.

In lockdown she has been working on educational projects and designing two drama-school shows. She is also one of the core team members of Scene Change, helping run its campaigns and doing advocacy. She also collaborated with Banerjee, winner of best director, on a children’s project after they met at the awards.

For Lauren O’Leary, winner of best actress in a play for The Awkward Years at the Other Room in Cardiff, lockdown has allowed her to concentrate on writing, though losing live performance has been hard. “It felt like I was building momentum and doing some great auditions and then it just stopped,” she says.

“I went back to writing and ended up with two TV show pilots I’m currently trying to find a home for,” she says. One is a comedy-drama about an Irish woman in New York. The other is an Irish-English bilingual crime drama. “I don’t think anything like it has been done in Ireland before,” she says.

On the night of the awards, O’Leary’s category was up first. She had flown in only a few days before, after performing in a play Off-Broadway and didn’t know what to expect. “I was in complete shock when I won. I had told my mum not to come, but she did. I’m so glad she did and it was one of the most incredible moments of my life.” She continues: “It was such a great event; it was so exciting. It’s important it’s going on this year.”

The Stage Debut Awards 2020 will be broadcast online at 7pm on September 27. Sign up to watch them for free at: thestage.co.uk/debuts