Theatre review: Grace Pervades

Playing in the West End at the same time as one of his earlier plays that's starting to show its age, David Hare's latest one consciously harks back to an even older tradition of performance than Teeth'N'Smiles: Grace Pervades centres on the most celebrated actress of the Victorian theatre, Ellen Terry (Miranda Raison) and her longstanding professional and personal relationship with actor-manager Henry Irving (Rafe "Ralph" Fiennes.) The latter chose her as his leading lady when he was setting up his own theatre company, convincing her to come out of retirement after she'd decided she would never be as good an actress as her sister. But once they start working together it's Terry who has the bigger impact on him, helping an actor who was admired for his intensity but criticised for his stiffness, to find a style with more connection to castmates and audiences alike.

But while he shows her a lot of respect for a man of his time the power imbalance is never entirely overcome, and despite promising her she could play Rosalind, his preference for tragedy and for putting himself centre stage meant he didn't keep it, and Terry never played Shakespeare's biggest female role.

There's a few themes of how the theatre can be a place where contradictions live together: Terry had two illegitimate children but although this was sometimes snidely referred to in reviews, her talent was enough to have her remain respected and beloved in a society superficially obsessed with propriety. Those two children serve as the play's narrators, and the huge contrast between them is suggested to be because of the different standards their mother held them to.

So Terry saw herself in her daughter and was stricter with her, and Edith (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) grows up to be a brisk, sensible feminist living in a lesbian throuple with Chris (Maggie Service) and Tony (Kathryn Wilder,) ending up building a small local theatre in tribute to her mother. In her son Ellen sees the man who left her but she still loves, and Teddy (Jordan Metcalfe) is an insufferable brat with ties to the Nazis, constantly declaring his own theatrical genius while failing to produce any watchable work of his own.

But the figure who serves as the play's comic foil does evidently have an appeal we never quite see, as Teddy is surprisingly successful with women, including an affair with the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan (Saskia Strallen,) and despite his own failure as a producer and director, Edward Gordon Craig's writing ended up becoming hugely influential later in the 20th century with the likes of Peter Brook.

But the amount of time spent on her children means I could never quite find the focus on Terry and her relationship with Irving that I wanted to see at the heart of the story. And while Raison is magnetic enough in the lead to show the actress the public always wanted to see more of (but Irving held back from them,) Hare teases an insight into her darker side he doesn't fully explore.

Bob Crowley's sets and Fotini Dimou's costumes give Jeremy Herrin's production the lush but severe look of 19th century staging that recreates the kind of event theatre that Irving was aiming for, and we also get a strong sense of his and Terry's commitment to taking the show to the people, often leaving London for regional UK and US tours. (They also seem to have had a few opinions about theatre that align with my own, like Irving's statement that "Hamlet works because it's a play, Romeo & Juliet doesn't because it's a poem.") An interesting sweep through the lives and legacies of these Victorian legends and Terry's in particular, but it does come out of focus a lot.

Grace Pervades by David Hare is booking until the 11th of July at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.