It was Kenneth Branagh's comeback performance as a stage actor in the West End and he blew Fleet Street's grizzled critics away.

The next day's reviews for the Donmar Warehouse's revival of Chekhov's Ivanov were stuffed with superlatives for his turn as a hard-drinking debtor facing up to a mid-life crisis.

The man, once hailed as a new Laurence Olivier, instantly became a front-runner for the theatre awards season. Yesterday, Branagh became a shock omission from the list of nominees for the Olivier Awards, Britain's most prestigious theatre prizes.

His absence meant that the two most high-profile male leads missed out. David Tennant's ricked back prevented him from appearing on stage as Hamlet enough times to qualify for consideration.

Branagh, who won the Critics' Circle award last month for Best Male Performance, simply failed to make the cut. Benedict Nightingale wrote in The Times after Ivanov's opening night in September last year that the actor “comes as close as an Englishman can to embodying the emotional blackness of a character Chekhov called 'purely Russian'”. “Performance of the year? Without a doubt,” wrote Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail. “He may make it look easy but this is a world-class talent.”

Both men were edged out by Derek Jacobi's Malvolio in Twelfth Night, by David Bradley and Michael Gambon in the late Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, and by Adam Godley in Rain Man (he played the Dustin Hoffman role of the autistic savant brother).

Tennant, who shared the Critics' Circle award for Best Shakespearean Performance with Jacobi, would have been a prime contender had a slipped disc not restricted him to 11 London performances. The awards require at least 28 performances so that all the judges have a chance to see them.

Oliver Ford Davies, nominated for his Polonius in the same production, said that Tennant's omission was “a shame because his performance had deepened and become more subtle” after his acclaimed run as Hamlet in Stratford last summer.

The Donmar Warehouse and the veteran producer Sonia Friedman's productions both earned 13 nominations. Friedman's exuberant drag-club musical La Cage aux Folles scored seven, the most for any individual production. They included two Best Actor nominations for the original leads, Douglas Hodge as the drag queen Albin and Denis Lawson as his partner Georges.

Friedman also earned nominations for the West End transfer of That Face by the first-time writer Polly Stenham, No Man's Land and Maria Friedman: Re-arranged. She said that audiences were ignoring the doomsayers, fuelling a buoyant box office at a time of year when takings were traditionally at their thinnest.

The Donmar Warehouse had four productions recognised in the year that it launched an innovative residency in the West End, based on classic plays and heavyweight theatre stars.

The first two plays under the banner of Donmar West End were Ivanov, and Twelfth Night. Piaf, which originated at the Donmar's smaller headquarters, secured five nominations including Best Musical Revival, Best Actress in a Musical, for Elena Roger and Best Supporting Actress for Katherine Kingsley. The Chalk Garden, directed by the artistic director Michael Grandage, took four, including nominations for its leading ladies, Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton.

It was a poor year for the National Theatre with only two plays recognised (August: Osage County from Chicago and The Pitmen Painters from Newcastle). Only one musical was recognised: the preposterously enjoyable adaptation of Zorro, with rousing music by the Gipsy Kings.

The awards will be presented on March 8. Nica Burns, president of the Society of London Theatre, said: “Nearly 14 million people have packed our theatres to enjoy a terrific night out in a record-breaking year.”

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