1st Night Photos: Old Vic 24 Hour & Court Wig Out!

The Old Vic played host to its fifth annual 24-hour play festival over the weekend, featuring a stellar line-up of performers including Josh Harnett, Sally Phillips, Hugh Bonneville and Martin Freeman. The event sees actors, writers and directors join forces to create a series of six plays to raise funds for the venue’s Old Vic New Voices department (See News, 13 November 2008).

Other actors participating in this year’s event included Henry Goodman, Jenny Agutter, Hamish Clark, Julia Davis, David Harewood, Jessica Hynes, Jenny Jules, Dervla Kirwan, Martina Laird, Sally Phillips, Tim Pigott-Smith and Lia Williams, who joined forces with directors Tamara Harvey, Clare Lizzimore, Anna Mackmin, Jonathan Munby and Josie Rourke, and writers Amelia Bullmore, Moira Buffini, Maurice Gran and Laurence Marks.

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PHOTOS BY DAN WOOLLER FOR WHATSONSTAGE.COM.

Our Whatsonstage.com photographer Dan Wooller was on hand for the now-customary ‘25th Hour’ party at Party on the Plaza, where the companies celebrated alongside Old Vic director Kevin Spacey and guests including artist Tracey Emin and actors Jason Isaacs, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Ralf Little and Mark Gatiss.

The event was co-hosted by radio DJ and TV presenter Johnnie Vaughan and James Corden, the original History Boy and creator of TV’s Gavin and Stacey, who also presented the 2008 Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers’ Choice Awards Show at which he famously snogged Best Newcomer winner Daniel Radcliffe (See WOS TV, 28 Feb 2008).

Also partying this weekend was the Royal Court, where a fest of drag queens ushered in the opening of its cross-dressing Christmas show, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out! at the Theatre Downstairs (28 November 2008, previews from 20 November).

For the show, the auditorium has been transformed by designer Ultz into the ‘House of Light’, a “hyper-glamorous and uber-competitive” drag queen refuge where the residents prepare for a catwalk showdown. But while the House are primping and preening, drag queen Nina is wooing the delectable Eric as ‘Wilson’, a de-camped, make-up free ‘straight’ gay man. How can Nina/Wilson strut the thorny divide between opposite genders and differing worlds?

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PHOTOS BY DAN WOOLLER FOR WHATSONSTAGE.COM.

Royal Court artistic director Dominic Cook directs a cast that includes Danny Sapani, Kate Gillespie, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Holly Quin-Ankrah and Leon Lopez, who were joined on opening night by guests including Richard Wilson, Sophie Okonedo, Beverley Knight, Lindsay Duncan and recent Bond girl Gemma Arteton.

Wig Out! runs until 10 January 2009.

- By Theo Bosanquet

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