David Hare’s new play (his 32nd), Grace Pervades, a sweeping, century-straddling meditation on the lives of Victorian theatrical titans Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, has opened at the fittingly historic Theatre Royal Haymarket following a successful premiere at Theatre Royal Bath. An ambitious work examining stagecraft through the lives of two iconic actors, it stretches from 1878 to the mid-20th century, allowing Hare to muse on whether the ephemeral nature of performance justifies the personal sacrifice and the wreckage of relationships so often left in its wake.
Ralph Fiennes is an obvious choice to play the dour workaholic actor-manager Henry Irving, whom he inhabits with a hawkish restlessness; so consumed by his duties at the Lyceum Theatre that he seems to have forgotten how to exist in the world outside. Miranda Raison’s Ellen Terry is not majestic, yet captures the elusive, girlish vitality that made Terry the highest-paid actress in England — a success juxtaposed with the irremediable toll her work took on her personal life, one that surpassed even her most complex Shakespearean roles.
From two scandalous and doomed relationships with men considerably older than herself — her failed marriage aged 17 to the painter George Frederick Watts, who was 30 years her senior, and then to the eccentric architect Edward Godwin, with whom she had two illegitimate children — it is easy to see how Terry’s years at the Lyceum led to the neglect of her daughter Edith (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) and son Edward Gordon Craig (Jordan Metcalfe). Nor is it surprising that the resentment both harboured led to a rebellion against their mother’s world.
Edward Gordon Craig’s own career as a set designer challenged the opulence of Irving’s productions in favour of a pared-back aesthetic focussing on light and shadow. Prone to over-intellectualising to the point of tedium, Hare shows that whilst Irving and Terry built the modern profession, they also inadvertently birthed the very forces that would eventually render their style obsolete.
Bob Crowley’s design, which leans heavily on stage furniture, an animated tableau for a backdrop and oft-changing costumes — not least the famous green dress worn by Terry as Lady Macbeth and captured in a portrait by John Singer Sargent — adds colour when needed, with director Jeremy Herrin maintaining the pace as best he can given Hare’s didactic speeches. Examining the purpose of theatre, one of the most transient art forms, he reminds us that creators are left with nothing but the experience and the memory.
A play which could have been electric instead prioritises the intellectual over the emotional. The audience is told of the “magic” created by — and existing between — Irving and Terry far more than they are allowed to experience it; it lacks the wit of Hare’s earlier polemics and offers a mellow retrospective of two of the most important figures in the history of the British stage. It is ultimately baffling how two people who led such exciting lives can be the subject of something so thoroughly tedious to watch.
Grace Pervades at Theatre Royal Haymarket until 11th July 2026. For more information and tickets, please visit www.trh.co.uk.
Photos by Mark Brenner
