Like many people, I always had a sneaking respect for Woody Allen's contrary refusal to grace the Oscars with his presence on the basis that the Academy would persist in holding them on the one day in the week when he had a regular gig playing jazz clarinet in a New York bar.
There is a man with a proper sense of priorities. However, as time goes by, my dismissal of the circus of awards ceremonies has become less exclusive. I will now admit to quite liking two: the Scottish Album of the Year, happening this Thursday in Glasgow's venerable Barrowland Ballroom, and the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland, held last Sunday in Edinburgh's Traverse. The former I am really looking forward to because the pressure of being a judge at the inaugural event last year will be off and I can boo or cheer Herald music critic Kate Molleson and the rest of the panel when they get it wrong (or right) on the night.
The CATS celebrated their 10th anniversary this year, and the 2013 event boasted the usual Herald-associated attractions of Mary Brennan being droll and mischievous in a hat and Neil Cooper being his outspoken self clad, unusually, in a suit. The point was well made by master of ceremonies Joyce McMillan, however, that the event is not about the critics but about Scottish theatre, and what a fine advertisement for that it was.
Guest presenter John Byrne was emphatic that his visual art gave him none of the frisson he got from working on live theatre, and one of the evening's big winners, Perth Theatre director Rachel O'Riordan, was explicit about the warmth of the welcome she had experienced from the Scottish theatre community since arriving from Ireland. Alan Cumming, on video from New York, said that the National Theatre of Scotland had given him the opportunity to do, in his solo Macbeth, the thing that he was most proud of in his career – and ended his contribution with a rude and funny visual gag.
In the same vein of all the above was the reaction of Vicky Featherstone, departed first chief exec of the NTS, to being named the second-ever winner of the Cat's Whiskers award. "If I'm the Cat's Whiskers," she told the gathering from the wider world of Scottish theatre, "you are the dog's bollocks."
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