Olivier awards recognise new generation of playwrights ready to don Tom Stoppard’s mantle

In December the lights of the West End were dimmed to mark the passing of Tom Stoppard.

The death of the great playwright at 88 was a reminder that many of Britain’s ­theatrical big hitters, those playwrights who made their names in the latter half of the last century, are a generation in decline.

But now, among the newcomers rising to take their places, it is possible to spot more than a few whose work might last as long.

The Olivier judges have saluted four of the finest writers for stage this year in a hotly contested field, the Best New Play category.

First among equals must be James Graham, whose Punch, which played at the Young Vic and the Apollo theatre, has three other nominations. It is based on the real life story of a Nottingham teenager who ended up killing a man with one blow, and, as The Observer critic Susannah Clapp asked, who better to tell this tale than the Nottingham-bred, Sherwood-creating, Dear England-conceiving Graham? What made his new play remarkable, Clapp said, was “how it begins as a singular history and ends as a universal statement”.

Also in contention is Ava Pickett’s historical drama 1536, which ran at the Almeida and tells the story of Anne Boleyn’s final year with such persuasiveness that Margot Robbie has picked up the rights for television. If you want to know what Robbie saw in it before it reaches the small screen, the play transfers to the West End for a short run in May.

Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian’s Kenrex ran at The Other Place and nightly transported its audience to a small American town in a production that pays homage to the cinematic tropes of the western and of Film Noir. Our critic Clare Brennan appreciated its “thrilling” presentation and its wit. Kenrex has six nominations overall.

Perhaps the standout in the category though, at least in terms of its powerful expression of the zeitgeist, is Suzie Miller’s play Inter Alia. Miller’s success comes on the heels of Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Comer and repeatedly wowed audiences in both London and New York.

Miller’s new one-woman drama cast Rosamund Pike as a judge and was another supremely confident charge at the issues that bedevil the lives of modern women. Opening in the National Theatre’s Lyttelton, it drew Pike back to the stage after 15 years away. Once again, there’s a Latin title, and once again the arguments are prosecuted head on.

Like Jack Thorne’s much-lauded Netflix drama Adolescence, Miller poses questions about how boys are being brought up. She also clearly wants her audience to consider what ought to matter most in the life of a woman with a career.

For The Observer critic Clapp, Pike’s character, Jessica, was “completely persuasive as a woman skittering between family and her duties”.

Photograph: David Corio/Getty