Last Updated on May 1, 2026
The Play’s The Thing
5.0 out of 5.0 stars
The Theatre Royal Bath is one of the country’s great theatrical producing houses and has a mutually beneficial informal relationship with its namesake theatre in the West End’s Haymarket, placing many of its productions there. Last year, Ralph Fiennes had his own season in Bath, which featured the sell-out premiere of the new David Hare play, Grace Pervades. The play opened in London last night refreshed with a few tweaks to the script.
Grace Pervades stars Fiennes as the leading Victorian actor-manager, Henry Irving, and Miranda Raison as his and the nation’s leading lady, Ellen Terry. It sketches out a potted history of their careers and their personal relationship. The piece also features the stories of Ellen’s two children, Edith Craig and Edward Gordon Craig, both of whom made important, if very different, contributions to developments in British theatre.
Hare’s play, Grace Pervades, is an ambitious elegy to that golden tradition of British actors that stretched from Irving to Gielgud, Richardson and Olivier. The script is elegant and witty, a love song to an age that has been jettisoned from contemporary cultural discourse, and that probably means little to younger audiences. The critic sitting next to me, probably in their 20s, muttered something about the language seeming stilted and that they didn’t connect with the play. What I heard was poetic, beautifully delivered and full of humanity and emotion. Whilst the script celebrates the past, being interpolated with many scenes from Shakespeare, through the plot mechanism of the younger characters, it also delivers a historical lesson on how modernist writers such as Ibsen, Strindberg and George Bernard Shaw renewed theatre in the early 20th century.
The role of Henry Irving is tailor-made for Fiennes: a haunted and driven autocrat who struggles with human contact and is consumed by his passion. It could just as well be a description of his role as dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread. Fiennes, in a series of fabulous wigs, is a dead-ringer for Irving, but there’s also a hint of Peter Cushing in his characterisation as he inhabits the stage like a splendid Gothic bird of prey. Irving’s acting style would be seen now as hammy and over the top, and Fiennes wisely tones down the great actor’s excesses. However, he delivers a prize-worthy performance that is driven, autocratic and ultimately very lonely and emotionally disconnected.
Miranda Raison as Ellen Terry is the perfect foil for Irving’s excesses. She brings a sense of humanity to the stage and is the only person who can reach into the great leading man’s solitary eyrie. Raison is the calm at the centre of the storm’s eye, holding Irving, the theatre company and her children together, whilst sacrificing her character’s own ambition at the altar of Irving’s ego.
Gollum’s girl (sorry), Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, reprises her role from Bath as Edith Craig, Terry’s daughter. Craig’s importance in the development of British political theatre is underplayed in the script, but her place at the centre of a jolly lesbian menage à trois at her mother’s Kent home is confidently played and raises a smile whilst giving an insight into the growth of radical feminist politics.
Jordan Metcalfe is deliciously annoying as Terry’s waspish and brittle ‘genius’ son Edward Gordon Craig. I had always thought the Gordon Craig theatre in Stevenage was probably named after some worthy civic benefactor rather than the radical theatrical theorist and influence on Peter Brook. Presented as both a figure of fun and a visionary, there is a terrific scene where ‘Teddy’ is trying to direct a production of Hamlet at the Moscow Arts Theatre under the watchful eye of Stanislavsky. Struggling to balance his idealism and repulsion at the fixity of the theatrical production process, he opines, “In an ideal world, we wouldn’t even open.”
Jeremy Herrin’s production is steeped in the lore and language of the theatre and makes the most of the Shakespearean monologues that pepper the piece. The actors have space to breathe on stage and to fully realise their characterisations. For much of Grace Pervades, we are onstage or backstage with the filmic jumpcuts zigzagging between decades and locations. Designer Bob Crowley handles these transitions seamlessly, taking us from Kensington to Hamburg through Moscow without breaking sweat.
With his 2025 Bath season, Fiennes was dipping his toes into Irving’s shoes, making Grace Pervades a play about an actor-manager by an actor-manager, and the fine ensemble is given a chance to shine. Saskia Strallen makes for a seductive and expressive Isadora Duncan, realistic about the prospects for her relationship with the promiscuous Teddy. Maggie Service is delightful as the deluded Christabel, her heart broken after a one-night sympathy fling with Vita Sackville-West and Kathryn Wilder as “Tony” Atwood effectively brokers the peace between Edith and Christabel
Cultural renewal is the privilege of the young, but The Theatre Royal Bath is doing all of us a service by sustaining our theatrical traditions and not throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the service of modish, funding-driven programming. By continuing to stage writers such as Terence Rattigan and by framing British theatrical history in Hare’s play, Grace Pervades, they are providing a sense of cultural continuity which should inform and not undermine the present. But maybe more importantly than any debates, go and see this show. It’s a terrific piece of theatre about the centrality of the art form to our society, and it’s a lot of fun.
24 April to 11 July 2026
Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, London SW1Y 4HT
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