The dominant Donmar picked up four of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards this year, proving that small can also be powerful when it comes to theatre. Eight years after winning Most Promising Newcomer in the same awards, the gorgeous Chiwetel Ejiofor takes the Best Actor gong for his Othello, despite hot competition from David Calder's Lear and Kenneth Branagh's Ivanov. Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton were named Best Actress jointly by the judges for......

The Evening Standard kicked off the 08/09 British Theatre awards season announcing their longlist of theatrical heavy-weights, newcomers, regulars and Hollywood stars for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. Kevin Spacey and Kenneth Branagh fight it out for the best actor accolade; Kev for Speed-The-Plow at the Old Vic, Ken for Ivanov, currently at Wyndham's. Wanna be in their gang? Better get some Shakespeare into your repertoire. Alongside Branagh and Spacey in the best actor......

Here’s what we’ve learned whilst you’ve been resolving to train for the marathon next year: Draconian new litter laws for motorists are to be piloted in London. The London Cycling Campaign are worried by a delay in new safety legislation for HGVs. Now BA pisses off all the other airlines by delaying the move of its long-haul operations to T5 until later on this year. Freud’s naked London civil servant is set to fetch......

Kevin Spacey today hijacked his own promo for new gambling film 21 to slam the BBC for giving certain West End musicals 13 weeks of free publicity disguised as reality TV shows. Whilst recognising that they helped promote West End theatre in general he's clearly got the hump that it's the camp musicals hogging the limelight and cashing in on ticket sales rather than the more serious plays running at theatres like his own......

Ahh, art or money? It's something we ponder daily here at Londonist. (Can't we have both?) The big question is also being asked over at the Old Vic by none other than Kevin Spacey and his mate Jeff Goldblum in Mamet's Speed-the-Plow. We're also pondering how to get our hands on tickets for this sure-to-sell-out show. Previews run til Saturday; the show's booking until April. Also Opening Photography fans should pop along to the......

While lesser politicians find themselves embroiled in the mundane tracasseries of campaign funding, our Mayor takes a more creative tact. Twenty artists, including Banksy, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn, are selling their work to raise money for Livingstone’s re-election. The ‘Bid For Ken’ auction takes place at 7pm on 6 March at the Aquarium Gallery in Farringdon. Boris Johnson is courting the creatives too. He of the humorous initials is focussing on ’singers, rappers......

Off to see Timberlake at the new-look Dome tonight? Make sure you don’t get the wrong venue. The Greenwich attraction isn’t the only O2 in town… The O2, Greenwich Peninsula Function: Entertainment venue, including stadium, 11-screen cinema and exhibition space. Includes Justin Timberlake. Age: 7.5 years. Opened at the end of 1999 as the Millennium Dome, now recalled to life as the O2. Capacity: 20,000 in the main arena. Size: 365 m diameter and the......

During her daily early-morning dog walking expedition through Hyde Park (no, not the Kevin Spacey variety), a Londonist contributor encountered a man wearing a navy blue outfit and cap, with natty red scarf, standing next to a pile of golf balls, practicing his golf swing as if Hyde Park were his personal driving range. He looked oddly like Hugh Hefner. Another regular park-goer, known only as English Sheepdog owner, spotted a similar looking man,......

Hollywood hunk Vince Vaughn will grace the stage at The Old Vic this Sunday, 8th October, as part of The 24 Hour Plays Benefit. "In collaboration with six writers and six directors, the actors will create and stage new works in just one day". Starting out in 1995 as "an opportunity to bring together a community of creative people in a time-limited experiment", The 24 Hour Plays "recently teamed with Planet Impact, a philanthropic......

An 80-year-old Blackheath woman who fell and broke her neck when the bus she was travelling on stopped suddenly, has died in hospital. Apparently "figures in London show a rise in robbery and other offences around the time of Halloween" so this year the Hallo-hoodies are going to get cracked down on. The late Princess Margaret allegedly enjoyed extra-marital one-night stands in London hotels. Kevin Spacey has waived his fee as the artistic director......

This week - A chap flying here and there with his pants on the outside of his trousers (Superman Returns), a drama/black comedy about death in Bucharest (The Death of Mr Lazarescu ) and a German film adaption of a Michel Houellebecq novel (Atomized) First up, is it a bird? No, it's far too big. Is it a plane? (Are there snakes on the plane?) No he's too small and brightly coloured to be......

A man was stabbed over the weekend when he asked 'a group of youths' to stop smoking on the 328 bus in Kilburn Park Road. Here's a new one: demolish airport and replace it with homes. 200 members of the train workers union Aslef are striking over a row over taxis. Prince Philip is not a big fan of Olympic ceremonies and has vowed to do "as little as possible" during the 2012 Games.......

The latest defection from LA to join the gangs of Hollywood ex-patratriates gobbling up the primest of London prime real estate is Neve Campbell. The film actress is currently in London rehearsing the Robert Altman directed, Arthur Miller scripted play Resurrection Blues at the Old Vic theatre in Waterloo. The Old Vic is no stranger to asylum seekers from Hollywood: no less than Kevin Spacey runs the place as Artistic Director and keeps up......

It was sighs all round this morning in the Londonist office when we read the news that Robert Altman is to direct Resurrection Blues at the Old Vic, starting next month. The audible relief sprang not from the fact that Altman is an accomplished director and should do a cracking job of Arthur Miller's script. Nor was it anything to do with the fact that Altman has brought on board Neve Campbell and Matthew......

- Heathrow's Terminal 2 is going to be demolished as part of the 2012 revamp. - Boeing's fuel-efficient jet landed at Heathrow at 1:13 p.m. yesterday after a 22 hour, 42 minute trip from Hong Kong that crossed two oceans and covered 11,664 nautical miles. Therefore breaking the world record for longest, nonstop flight by a commercial airliner. - On the tenth anniversary of his death, a stainless steel sculpture of a Nigerian bus decorated......

What is Kevin Spacey doing? Just as it looked as he was recovering from the whole 'taking my dog for a walk in the middle of the night' debacle, and the fact that Cloaca wasn't very good, he has to go and give Justin Timerblake a job. Londonist actually breathed a sigh of relief at the weekend when we read in this Observer interview that (contrary to tabloid rumours) Spacey hadn't been offering Cameron......

Zombies, plague, fire, aliens, vampires, bombs, giant kittens... London's had quite a few things thrown at it over the years in both real life and fantasy, but no one expected the biggest threat to come from our feathered friends. The threatened deadly bird flu epidemic however has got a lot of people jumpy. Perhaps even more so after Sunday's report in the Times that we don't have enough antiviral drugs to go around. It......

It's a tough life being a Hollywood star in the big smoke. You slog your guts out, honing your craft on the stage every night for these limey plebs who insist on keeping their 'cell phones' turned on the whole time. And all you want to do afterwards is get to a lapdancing club where you can have your ego stroked a bit by some gelatinous bint who might recognise you from that film......

Anyone off to the Old Vic tomorrow evening will be greeted by Canary Wharf's cleaners as part of a delegation from the Transport and General Workers Union in an attempt to raise public awareness of their campaign for a living wage. Morgan Stanley who are sponsoring the Kevin Spacey play National Anthems are accused by the union of treating their cleaning staff unfairly. T&G organiser Paul Davies says: "Cleaners who earn under £6 an......

London’s theatre land area is to get a makeover courtesy of a £6 million pound cash injection, the first 1.8 million of which "has been raised from Transport for London, Westminster council, the Cross-River Partnership and theatres themselves". The scheme has plans to widen the pavements on Coventry street, the tourist rat-run between Picadilly Circus and Leicester Square, and improve the lighting in the overall area to discourage muggers, drug-users and other inhabitants of......

Today's Telegraph has a good article on "female impresario", Sally Greene's recent investment in the legendary Soho jazz club. Greene is the woman who 'saved' the Old Vic, convinced Kevin Spacey to becoem a patron of the theatre, persuaded Elton John to write all 19 songs for the Billy Elliot musical (so, she has her flaws too), and has just booked Sharon Osbourne for the Vagina Monologues. Greene has gone into partnership with Pete......

Getting the remake treatment this week is the fondly remembered Magic Roundabout, recreated in a very European computer generated style, with the added draw of celebrity voices, such as Kylie Minogue, Joanna Lumley, Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent and Robbie Williams. This doesn't save the film from taking a critical kicking as both Bradshaw in The Guardian (two stars) and James Christopher in The Times (two stars also) aren't exactly engaged in a nostalgia fest,......

The big release this week is raging smug-fest Oceans Twelve, a sequel to the remake of Oceans Eleven, and it's not fairing well with the critics. Bradshaw in the Guardian maintains his always high standard of vitriol with probably the harshest line directed towards welsh pensioner-fancier Catherine Zeta-Jones, "her Welsh accent re-surfaces when she isn't acting very well: ie, 100% of the time." He also manages to throw in a reference to "Jumping the......

Today sees a new portrait of Dame Judy Dench unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery. The artist Alessandro Raho usually drapes his subjects in theatrical clothes but with Dame Judy he has opted for a simple white jacket against a stark white background. Inspiration came, unusually enough, while he was spying on the actress: "I attempted to trap something I saw in her while she waited in the main hall of the National Portrait......