This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Is there a more damning description of an evening at the theatre than “fine”? By which I don’t mean “it was a fine night in all regards”, but the “it’s alright, I suppose” shrug that that most condescending of terms implies.
But then David Hare’s latest play Grace Pervades is the very epitome of middling. It is intelligent enough, well-acted enough — with one glorious exception — and passes two and a half hours in a pleasant and undemanding fashion. Yet it’s hard not to feel that the combined star power here should have resulted in something far more thrilling and vital than the rather polite theatrical pageantry that passes by on the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s stage.
If there is a reason to venture into the West End to see the play, it is for Ralph Fiennes, reprising his role as the legendary Victorian actor Henry Irving from the Bath premiere last summer.
Fiennes is always worth seeing on stage whatever he does, whether it’s classical theatre, new writing or his one-man performance of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Here he offers a typically sensitive and nuanced reading of Irving, an actor whose enormous popularity was bedevilled by a combination of self-doubt and generosity that saw him spend most of his life in colossal debt, as he repeatedly revived an old barnstormer, The Bells, to subsidise his passion for Shakespeare.
Hare’s central conceit is a decent one, in its exploration of Irving’s relationship with Miranda Raison’s Ellen Terry, the other star actor of the day. The two worked together for decades in Shakespearean roles — Hare has a good running joke about her perpetually thwarted desire to play Rosalind in As You Like It, a play Irving detests for its levity — and almost certainly were involved romantically at points, a supposition that the play offers without over-emphasising its likelihood.
Hare suggests that Terry moved Irving away from a bombastic, stiff style of classical acting towards something more naturalistic and contemporary, resulting in an approach that has lasted until the present day.
All of this is perfectly interesting and worthwhile. Fiennes and Raison work well together on stage, although I could not help feeling that the part of Terry needed a truly transcendent, vital performer for it to work completely.
Irving is something of a moaner, complaining about his “heavy leg” and dour disposition, and it isn’t wholly clear why Terry decides to throw in her personal and professional lot with him.
Yet their scenes together are entertaining, strike a certain number of sparks and make for one of the more diverting pas de deux in the West End.
The problem with Grace Pervades, however, is that Hare has shied away from making it a two-hander, perhaps in the belief that the relationship between Irving and Terry isn’t dramatic enough to sustain an entire play.
After the initial scenes of their professional partnership blossoming, theirs is a mutually supportive relationship without any particular tension or fall-out, lasting right up until Irving’s death in 1905. (Of course there is a death bed scene; of course Fiennes, in his last in an array of wigs, is reliably excellent.) So, to expand (or pad out) the drama, Hare introduces the characters of Terry’s children, the director and suffragette Edith Craig and the insufferably priggish modernist practitioner Edward Gordon Craig.
Both are well played, respectively, by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis and Jordan Metcalfe, who offer compelling performances rich in humour and, occasionally, pathos. Yet their scenes have little or nothing to do with the Irving-Terry plot and often feel wholly extraneous.
One lengthy diversion involves Edward attempting to stage Hamlet in Russia with the aid of Stanislavski, and another shows Edith ministering to her boisterous friend Christabel (a nice role for Maggie Service), who has been romantically disappointed after a night of passion with none other than Vita Sackville-West.
They are entertaining enough by themselves but have nothing to do with the more compelling main storyline — save, I suppose, in some vague attempt to show the tentacular reach of Terry’s influence on theatre and life. But this is clutching at straws.
Still, Jeremy Herrin’s brisk, well-cast production is decently paced and always interesting, even if it short-changes the audience when it comes to pathos or genuine emotional investment.
I suspect that it would have struggled to make it onto the stage — especially the Haymarket — if it did not have the names of Sir David and Fiennes behind it, but there is a pleasing absence of revisionist wokery or right-on modishness present, even if I had occasional doubts that the now 78-year old playwright is really the best person to sketch out a sapphic menage à trois.
It is a perfectly acceptable, occasionally thought-provoking and pleasant evening that is unlikely to linger long in the memory. And if this all sounds as if I’m damning it with faint praise, well, guilty as charged.
But at least there is praise that can be levelled at Grace Pervades, which is more than can be said for some regrettable evenings I have had at the theatre. Including, it must be said, at productions of Sir David’s plays.
