The Inheritance nominated for eight Olivier Awards
The Inheritance play (Publicity shot)
Gay-themed play The Inheritance has been nominated for eight Olivier Awards.
The nominations were announced on Tuesday (March 5) ahead of the award ceremony, which will take place on April 7.
The acclaimed drama, penned by Matthew Lopez and directed by Billy Elliot‘s Stephen Daldry, is up for best new play, while Daldry is nominated for best director.
Kyle Soller, who played lead character Eric Glass, is nominated for best actor, while Vanessa Redgrave has landed a nomination for best actress in a supporting role.
The Inheritance play ended its West End run in January. (Publicity shot)
The show is also nominated for best lighting design, best sound design, best set design and outstanding achievement in music, bringing its total number of Olivier Awards nominations to eight.
The Inheritance is already an award-winning Play
The nearly seven-hour play, which ran at London’s Young Vic and Noel Coward Theatres, focuses on a group of gay men living in modern-day New York, a generation on from the AIDS epidemic.
The play has already scooped best play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in November, and picked up three awards at the 2019 Critics’ Circle Awards.
“If I had a goal for this play, it was to foster a conversation between generations.”
— The Inheritance playwright Matthew Lopez
Another gay-themed AIDS drama, Angels in America, scooped two awards at 2018’s Olivier Awards.
The Inheritance ‘bridges gap’ between generations over AIDS crisis
Speaking to The Telegraph in October about the play, Lopez described The Inheritance as an attempt to bridge gaps across different generations of LGBT+ people.
The playwright said: “Kids I have met are aware of their right to a place in the world, their right to dignity.
“Yet there is also a sense of loss for something that they can’t articulate, a loss that’s due to earlier generations being in the closet and then a huge section of the community dying of AIDS in the eighties and early nineties.
“If I had a goal for this play, it was to foster a conversation between generations.”
The show’s West End run ended on January 19, but Soller previously hinted at a potential Broadway transfer.
He told the Evening Standard in April: “There hasn’t been any talk but I think that’s what everyone hopes.
“[We want] to reach as many people as possible, given how important the discussion is. A seven-hour play about love is exactly what we need in this day and age.”
