Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2018: 'I wrote The Inheritance to heal' says Best Play winner Matthew Lopez

Zoe Paskett19 November 2018

The Inheritance playwright Matthew Lopez said that he wrote the epic two-parter about gay life in New York "in order to heal".

He picked up the Best Play in association with Chanel at tonight’s 64th Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

The seven hour drama retells EM Forster’s Howards End in modern day New York among a group of young gay men.

Accepting the award, Lopez joked: “No one goes into a career as a playwright because they are well adjusted,” continuing that “being gay was the most joyful and the most traumatic truth of my life for so much of my life. I needed to look at the trauma and heal from it and live my life in joy and that’s why I wrote this play.”

He was presented the award by Vanessa Redgrave, star of the original cast of The Inheritance at the Young Vic and its transfer, which is currently running at the Noel Coward Theatre. The Standard’s review called it “the play of this year and last year and quite possibly next year as well”. Read the full review here.

The Inheritance was up for two other awards at tonight’s ceremony: the Milton Shulman Award for Best Director, for Stephen Daldry, and Best Actor in partnership with Ambassador Theatre Group for Kyle Soller. When asked if the play should transfer to Broadway, Soller told the Standard: "hell yeah ".

You can read the full list of winners here.

Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2018 - Red carpet arrivals

1/95

The awards were held in association with fashion label and official platinum partner Michael Kors.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in