Disaster faced the fledgling Evening Standard theatre awards in their inaugural year. The world-famous conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent threatened to destroy them with bad publicity if his fellow judges chose Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as best new play.
By a distinctively British compromise, Beckett's account of two tramps was honoured instead as most controversial play of the year.
Godot became a classic of its time, and the awards survived. And yesterday - on their 50th anniversary - the director behind the controversial production, Sir Peter Hall, disclosed the "dangerous moment" when he presented Beckett's close dramatic cousin Harold Pinter with a special award as the outstanding British dramatist of the last half century.
The honour drove home the point that theatrical taste has moved decisively Beckett's way rather than in the direction Sargent wanted. The conductor, then a household name with wide public influence, had dismissed Godot as "pointless, an insult to the theatre and a completely ridiculous piece of writing", Hall told the awards ceremony in London
"On that night the British theatre grew up and the Evening Standard made a moment of history." The work chosen by compromise as best play of 1954, Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates, is now largely forgotten.
Hall praised Pinter as the playwright who "has brought poetry back to English theatre, not as something decorative but rooted in the vitality of modern language. The foundation of his work is the Cockney piss-take, contest or confrontation."
Amid cheers, Pinter accepted the award, a statuette, happily - and with a barbed memory. "Forty six years ago my [first] play The Birthday Party was performed in London and slaughtered by the critics - particularly by the Evening Standard, by the way.
"But in the early new year I'm happy to say that rehearsals will start for the fourth revival in London.
"So not only is this award very gratifying in itself, it is also gratifying in terms of its timing."
Dame Judi Dench, the most consistently outstanding actress of the last half century since her Old Vic debut in 1957, was cheered and clapped by a standing ovation to the stage to receive her special statuette. "I have been given this for 47 years of doing a job I absolutely adore," she said.
One of the most popular honours for achievement this year went to Richard Griffiths, who plays Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter films.
He won the best actor award for his gently literate school master in Alan Bennett's The History Boys, which also won the best play statuette. The well-built Griffiths stumbled on his way to the stage. Helped to his feet by Dame Diana Rigg and the compere Rory Bremner, he joked, "It's because I can't see my feet."
He told the audience that a sense of inadequacy almost led him to withdraw from the production, but his wife persuaded him to stay.
Other awards were:
· Best actress: Victoria Hamilton in Suddenly Last Summer, by Tennessee Williams.
· Best musical: The Producers, adapted by Mel Brooks and others from his film.
· Best director: Rufus Norris for Festen, adapted by David Eldridge from the film.
· Best design: Festen.
· Outstanding newcomer: Eddie Redmayne in The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia, by Edward Albee
· Charles Wintour bursary for new playwriting (worth £30,000): Owen McCafferty for Scenes From the Big Picture
· 50th anniversary special award for an institution: the National Theatre
