A co-founder of the prestigious Sydney Theatre Awards has attacked the organisation’s elimination of male and female acting categories as “woke, PC” and “downright offensive”, and revealed how she resigned over the switch to gender-neutral prizes for drama and musicals stars.
Veteran theatre critic Diana Simmonds noted that while awards bodies including the Oscars and the Golden Globes were lifting their game by becoming more diverse, “in Sydney, however, things have gone another step into full-on La La Land’’.
The 2022 awards, announced last Monday, featured six gender-neutral acting prizes across main stage, independent and musicals productions – a sharp decrease from the 12 acting prizes available before 2021, when male and female categories were being used.
A spokesperson for the awards said these reforms were implemented in 2021 after it was decided “that the system of dividing performers into two groups (male and female) and ignoring a third group’’ – gender non-conforming performers – was “exclusionary”.
With other theatre critics, Simmonds helped establish the awards in 2005, while she was reviewing for The Sunday Telegraph.
A former arts editor of The Bulletin, she told The Australian that when the decision was made two years ago to effectively halve the number of acting awards by offering only one degendered prize in each performance category, “I just couldn’t believe it’’.
She decided to write and speak publicly about her resignation, which was sparked by the move to gender-neutral acting gongs, when she saw “the results” of the 2022 awards.
Simmonds’ protest comes as the UK’s leading music prizes, the Brit Awards – which went gender-neutral in 2021 – faced a backlash over its all-male line-up of nominees for the best artist category. This year, all five nominees in that category – Stormzy, Central Cee, Fred Again, George Ezra and Harry Styles – are male.
This is despite the awards eliminating gender categories in 2021 in a bid to be more inclusive, especially towards non-binary artists such as Sam Smith.
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