“Grace Pervades”, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Jeremy Malies in the West End
2 May 2026
★★★★☆

“If you have to think why you’re doing a play, then don’t do it!” David Hare includes the line in his piece about the intense acting partnership between Henry Irving and Ellen Terry which has transferred to London from Theatre Royal Bath.

Miranda Raison as Ellen Terry.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

The line is not from Irving (played by an outstanding Ralph Fiennes) but from Jordan Metcalfe as Edward Gordon Craig, one of Terry’s two illegitimate children fathered by architect Edward Godwin. You can just imagine a waspish critic leaping on the quote, and the remark is perhaps a gesture of defiance from Hare to show that he knows his play is very good indeed.

The main plot of Grace Pervades is the intense acting partnership and friendship (possibly quasi-romantic) between Irving and Terry from 1878 to Sir Henry’s death in 1905.

Hare and director Jeremy Herrin have the play dart around chronologically, but it always maintains logic in terms of how central themes are explored. Those themes are largely tensions; conflict between expressionism and realism in direction, the Grand Tradition and naturalism in acting, and theatre’s battle to be the pre-eminent artistic form in late Victorian England at the expense of the novel.

With a proscenium arch within a proscenium arch as well as an evocative re-creation of backcloths and painted firecloths at the Lyceum Theatre off the Strand in the late 1870s, the design by Bob Crowley is one of many merits here. There are mini set pieces early on, with Miranda Raison as Terry doing “The quality of mercy is not strain’d …” and Lady Macbeth shortly after she has heard of the victory outside Forres.

This succession of big speeches by Terry at the beginning makes us realize that her emotional spontaneity and break with the old declamatory style is marking her out as an innovator but one still operating in a tradition of rhetorical emphasis. There are gorgeous exchanges as Raison tells Fiennes that he might want to look at the other actors occasionally, advice that makes him wince. Similarly, after a day of rehearsing Twelfth Night she says, “They’re scared of you. This is supposed to be a comedy!”

Ralph Fiennes (foreground).
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Terry wants to see plays, not in the style of Stanislavskian demands within a personal journey but as a more spontaneous and visual effort than the traditionalist Irving would want. But we see Irving thaw, and he tells her that he is intrigued by the fact that she is different each time in rehearsal as she probes the role.

I’m a sucker for characters discussing the craft of acting. I particularly enjoyed sequences (they reminded me of Our Country’s Good and the film The Libertine) in which Terry visits Irving in his dressing room for a nip of port, one exploratory kiss, and deep dives into how to suit the action to the word. Terry says that while she is flattered that the critics all say she “floats” about the stage, the illusion of floating is in fact the product of acquired technique and hard graft.

The role of Terry’s daughter Edith Craig is played by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis who is generally superb and frequently comes to the apron of the stage with the right ethereal quality to suggest that she, her own generation, and the generation before her are all ghosts that Hare has conjured up for us.

A theatre director, costume designer, and Suffragette (though not a front-line militant) Edith lived in a lesbian triangle relationship with dramatist Christabel Marshall (played by Maggie Service) and painter Clare “Tony” Atwood who is played by Kathryn Wilder. For me, Wilder never made the transition from her earlier role of Ellen Terry’s sister Kate, so leaving me confused. As Wilder’s character moans about her misery after a one-night stand with (unseen) Vita Sackville-West, Hare descends into bad Alan Bennett territory. The play trod water for some minutes as art about art and a list of marginal figures that created a lecturing quality. The theatre was temporarily drained of energy despite Ashbourne Serkis’s vibrant presence.

Herrin is known for a collaborative rehearsal style. I wonder how he would have fared with the actual Henry Irving. Hare has Irving say that he has been educated by the way in which Terry has re-examined the dynamic of the play, experimenting a little in each rehearsal. As he comes under her spell he confesses, “I’m uncomfortable with women.”

Raison argues with Fiennes, saying that her ideas on Ophelia make her want to be the one other character in the play who wears black. Her ardour and manner of looking forward to the suicide made me long to see Raison-Terry doing the whole scene. Irving finally lets Terry choose her own black dress. (Costumes here are by Fotini Dimou whose finest moment comes when we move to Russia in 1912.) Irving does not often cede ground and prefers, “A company of equals in which I am the boss!” But chided for being too staid and averse to improvisation, he says, “I shall strive to be more last-minute!”

The best visual humour (and costumes) of the night come when the action switches to Moscow in 1912 and the Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet by Edward Craig and Stanislavski. And we actually see Stanislavski portrayed on stage by Guy Paul, a first for anybody surely unless they saw the Bath run. Hare has already poked fun at the pretentiousness and self-absorption of Craig who was on record as saying that he preferred to write in art magazines about how theatre should be done than to be an actual practitioner. Hare’s research here has been forensic as usual. He mines “The Mousetrap” for detailed comedy without ever being low-brow. Much fun is had with the fact that the production has been in preparation for three years and is still beset by fundamental problems. Dimou’s costumes and the actors’ hair (Susanna Peretz) are uncannily close to the contemporary studio publicity cast photographs taken on a huge plate camera.

So, we have seen rehearsals of two very different productions of Hamlet. It’s hard not to make comparisons with an equally frenetic rehearsal process of the same play in The Motive and the Cue.

Metcalfe nails his character’s pomposity and pretensions throughout, and there has already been a fine scene with Isadora Duncan (Saskia Strallen) who was his romantic partner for three years at the turn of the century. Again, Dimou captures Duncan’s trademark Greek-inspired costume.

In terms of time scheme, the furthest forward we come is Provence in 1966. Craig, now 94, tells us that he is in straitened circumstances but kept alive by a monthly remittance from an international group of supporters who club together. And he has an occasional young visitor (actually in his forties) who has entranced him and is “a fellow enemy of realism”. The acolyte is Peter Brook. There was a murmur in the stalls as Brook’s name was mentioned. With Christopher Hampton (80) and Trevor Nunn (86) in the row behind me I thought about flames being passed and my throat tightened.

A real merit of the writing is that Hare avoids easy laughs, and Fiennes does nothing from the famed melodrama The Bells. A lesser playwright would have quoted from it as a running gag. This fine work will appeal to the widest possible range of audiences but is a joy for anybody in the business or enamoured of theatre history.