“Grace Pervades” at Theatre Royal Bath
Simon Thomas in South West England
4 July 2025
Bath’s Theatre Royal has had its fair share of highs in recent years and a short season hosted by actor Ralph Fiennes looks set to continue the trend. To launch the three plays (two new works and a Shakespeare), a premiere by David Hare looks almost like showing off.
Ralph Fiennes as Henry Irving
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
The subtitle for Grace Pervades is “The story of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving” and, while it is that to some extent, Hare crams in for good measure the history of Terry’s two illegitimate children, Edith and Edward Gordon Craig, which he describes as “no less fascinating” as that of their mother. By combining three plays in one, he perhaps bites off more than he can chew, doing justice to none of them, although the continual dodging between the narratives allows for a complex rippling of themes.
The Terry/Irving story explores the ambiguous relationship between the two greatest actors of their age. Was it a love affair that never quite took flame? There’s no central conflict, although Terry challenges Irving’s practices from time to time. Mostly she just worships him and, whether it’s the fault of Hare’s writing or Miranda Raison’s portrayal, Terry comes across as just a thoroughly nice woman rather than a towering figure with a scandalous personal life. Perhaps the play’s title gives us a hint of what Hare intends and this is an evening of suggestions rather than clear signals. Raison gets to show us snippets of Terry’s performances (Portia, Lady Macbeth, Viola, Rosalind) but while she is very good she doesn’t quite convince us that this was a very great actress.
Sadly, we don’t get to see Irving act, apart from a very brief moment as Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII late in the day, when Ralph Fiennes’s riveting delivery makes us yearn for much more. It’s like a piece of music that plods along for a couple of hours and then frustratingly fans into flame for a second or two before dying away. It would have been great to have seen Fiennes incarnate something of Irving’s signature role of Mathias in The Bells, when we might have got more of a sense that this was the greatest player of the century, one worthy of the first theatrical knighthood.
Otherwise, Fiennes gives a characteristically terrific performance, his habitual gait only slightly exaggerated to give him the demeanour of a benevolent vampire, held back in his personal relationships by a self-confessed awkwardness around women.
Helena Lymbery and Ruby Ashbourne Serkis.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
What Hare avoids is any sense of pastiche of Victorian theatrical practice, a wise move as cod performances which allow an “enlightened” modern audience to laugh at outdated mannerisms and customs would have been pretty unbearable. Instead, he treats the subject with the utmost respect in a loving homage to former times and he’s aided in this by ravishing visuals and immaculate direction by Jeremy Herrin. Much of the time the stage looks like a Victorian photo, coloured and brought to life, something we’re getting used to seeing on Instagram with the aid of AI which is helping us to see the past in vivid and immediate terms. John Singer Sergeant’s famous portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth springs to life in front of us at one point. Full credit to Bob Crowley (sets), Fotini Dimou (costumes), and Peter Mumford (lighting) for evoking the past so beautifully. There’s a subtle sense of underlighting throughout, brought about not by intrusive footlights but lanterns hung low down on the proscenium arch.
The other two stories that don’t quite hang together with that of the Terry/Irving relationship are those of Edith Craig and her ménage a trois and that of her brother, the effete Edward who tried to redefine theatre without the inconvenience of such extraneous elements as actors.
Edith is strongly played by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis who it would be kinder to call a member of her own theatrical dynasty rather than a nepo baby (she’s the daughter of actors Lorraine Ashbourne and Andy Serkis). We see her in her triangular relationship with Christabel Marshall (Helena Lymbery) and Clare “Tony” Atwood (Kathryn Wilder) as she carves her own way as a prolific theatrical impresario, a forerunner of the likes of Joan Littlewood.
Jordan Metcalfe is a foppish Edward Gordon Craig in the third strand, as he too tries to make his own individualistic way in the theatre. One of the most fascinating scenes is his showdown with Stanislavski (an urbane Guy Paul) on the 1912 production of Hamlet in Moscow, with his visionary design suggested by monumental slabs disappearing into the distance. Craig struggles to get across to the great Russian polymath his ideas of a theatre where flesh and blood, fabrics and tea breaks are just a nuisance and theory is everything. It’s a prototype of conceptual art where thought is all that matters and execution of little consideration. One wonders how he managed to father 13 children with a number of different women.
If the three stories don’t quite gel, then one gets the sense that this is a play that’s difficult to fully appreciate on first viewing. Hare’s meaning is always elusive and one can’t help thinking that multiple viewings of Grace Pervades and/or a thorough study of the text would yield riches that are not immediately apparent. Certainly, it’s a complex and skilfully wrought text, as one would expect from so eminent a dramatist, but the audience is liable to leave feeling something’s missing and the playwright could have helped them more.
Nevertheless, this is a stimulating evening and bodes well for the future offerings under Fiennes’s stewardship. Next up is As You Like It over the summer, which he will direct, and then he returns to the stage in October with a new play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
