Sri Lankan Thespian Wins Olivier Award

Wins ‘Best Actor’ for his stage portrayal of Pi

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” wrote the immortal Swan of Avon over four centuries ago. And William Shakespeare added, for good measure: “They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…”

This is certainly true for Sri Lankan actor Hiran Abeysekera. Born in Colombo and educated at Nalanda College, he’s been playing a panoply of roles on stages across the world. From the lead role in a British Council production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus in 2007 to playing Peter Pan on a London stage eight years later, he’s portrayed many characters.

These span the gamut from Valere in Tartuffe (his stage debut with the English Touring Theatre in 2011) through the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Bartholomew in The Taming of the Shrew (2012) to Leonardo da Vinci in the Hampstead Theatre’s Botticelli in the Fire (2018) – to name a few.

An alumnus of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), from which he graduated in 2011, Abeysekera has inhabited a plethora of memorable characters in his personal dramatis personae. And demonstrably, none were more memorable than his portrayal of the eponymous character in the stage adaptation of The Life of Pi.

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Yann Martel, which won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2002 and was adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti, The Life of Pi received rave reviews from audiences and critics alike, in both its Sheffield and London productions.

Having premiered in 2019 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, it transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End in 2021, and went on to win five Laurence Olivier Awards (including one for Best New Play), the same number of UK Theatre Awards and Best New Play at the WhatsOnStage Awards.

But the fame and glory it brought one young thespian – 37-year-old Hiran Abeysekera, who won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in this play – will do more than ‘strut and fret his hour upon the stage’… for surely, we will hear more from a young Sri Lankan whom we’ve already seen on the boards as well as on TV.

For he has been in Russell T. Davies’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016) and the fantasy dance series Find Me In Paris (2018-19) by Hulu as well.

The fame and glory it brought one young thespian – 37-year-old Hiran Abeysekera, who won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor … will do more than ‘strut and fret his hour upon the stage’