David Hare may not be the radical political firebrand he once was - a revival of his 1975 play Teeth ‘n’ Smiles is playing a few streets away and shows some of that terrible infancy - but his recent works show an undimmed curiosity in how we’ve created the world around us, channelled through carefully researched history, as in his 2022 play Straight Line Crazy about the architect Robert Moses and his 2019 film The White Crow about the dancer Rudolf Nureyev.
Both of those were collaborations with Ralph Fiennes – actor in the former, director of the latter – and that partnership has been fascinating to watch, the two almost like each other’s muses. In a way it feels like the relationship has been building to this: a big portrait of two of the most important actors who ever lived, a history of and an endearing paean to theatre.
Dame Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving are in no small way the reason audiences get to sit in the Theatre Royal Haymarket and watch Fiennes of an evening. At the end of the 19th century they restored theatre to respectability pretty much for the first time since Shakespeare’s day. Grace Pervades is the story of their time on stage, a winking exploration of traditionalism and populism in theatre that itself is a traditional, populist piece of theatre.
The opening moment sets the tone perfectly: director Jeremy Herrin has a grand tableau of a dozen actors appear backlit and framed by a proscenium arch, who then take their places on stage to tell the story of the stage. There are clipped vowels and lavish costumes – Fiennes looks great in tights and a brocade cape – and it all looks rather lovely, with stuff on the stage cluttering the wings (costume rails, props) while painted backdrops are projected onto a screen upstage. Fotini Dimou’s lighting is made up of bright spotlight beams thrown across the stage at angles, again accenting that heightened world of performance that we are being invited into.
Fiennes pulls those same awkward angles into his performance as Irving. To begin with he stands stiff and awkward, leg cocked, arms strangely twisted against his body. As he learns from Miranda Raison’s Terry, he loosens. He really looks like he’s having a great deal of fun as this pale, sour-faced man who by many accounts gave the greatest tragic performances of all time. ‘It is said I have a heavy presence,’ he says lugubriously, and while saying it his head hangs low; long speeches allow him to declaim and intone and just when the ham gets too much, he pulls it back.
Raison has a tough job as Terry: before we meet her, she is introduced by her daughter as ‘one of the greatest actors in the history of England’. She then has to live up to that by going straight into the ‘quality of mercy’ speech from The Merchant of Venice. But Raison, too, gives a strong performance, all wide-eyed and heart-on-sleeve, similarly enjoying that slide between acting and acting acting.
With plenty of research which only occasionally clunks its way into the lines, Hare explores their relationship, definitely devoted and possibly sexual. He also shows us that even towards the end of their careers, their style was beginning to look outmoded. At first, the interruptions of Ruby Ashbourne Serkis and Jordan Metcalfe as Terry’s two children Edith and Edward seem out of place. Why do we care about these two slightly odd scions, one a radical feminist theatremaker and the other a radical theatre theorist?
But it becomes clear that they are the contrast to the dowdy old school of Irving; they are the modernism he rejects. By projecting forward in time, Hare can show how much and how quickly theatre has changed, and how the stage embraces or rejects the political tides that crash around them. Edgar works with Stanislavski and is admired by Peter Brook; Edith worships Sylvia Pankhurst, while the great liberal George Bernard Shaw lurks in the background.
It’s all good fun, a cheeky, self-referential and sometimes self-critical play. Never exceptional, but nor too dull, Hare’s play becomes a sweet panegyric, and a really traditional, really entertaining night both at the theatre and of the theatre.
Both of those were collaborations with Ralph Fiennes – actor in the former, director of the latter – and that partnership has been fascinating to watch, the two almost like each other’s muses. In a way it feels like the relationship has been building to this: a big portrait of two of the most important actors who ever lived, a history of and an endearing paean to theatre.
Dame Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving are in no small way the reason audiences get to sit in the Theatre Royal Haymarket and watch Fiennes of an evening. At the end of the 19th century they restored theatre to respectability pretty much for the first time since Shakespeare’s day. Grace Pervades is the story of their time on stage, a winking exploration of traditionalism and populism in theatre that itself is a traditional, populist piece of theatre.
The opening moment sets the tone perfectly: director Jeremy Herrin has a grand tableau of a dozen actors appear backlit and framed by a proscenium arch, who then take their places on stage to tell the story of the stage. There are clipped vowels and lavish costumes – Fiennes looks great in tights and a brocade cape – and it all looks rather lovely, with stuff on the stage cluttering the wings (costume rails, props) while painted backdrops are projected onto a screen upstage. Fotini Dimou’s lighting is made up of bright spotlight beams thrown across the stage at angles, again accenting that heightened world of performance that we are being invited into.
Fiennes pulls those same awkward angles into his performance as Irving. To begin with he stands stiff and awkward, leg cocked, arms strangely twisted against his body. As he learns from Miranda Raison’s Terry, he loosens. He really looks like he’s having a great deal of fun as this pale, sour-faced man who by many accounts gave the greatest tragic performances of all time. ‘It is said I have a heavy presence,’ he says lugubriously, and while saying it his head hangs low; long speeches allow him to declaim and intone and just when the ham gets too much, he pulls it back.
Raison has a tough job as Terry: before we meet her, she is introduced by her daughter as ‘one of the greatest actors in the history of England’. She then has to live up to that by going straight into the ‘quality of mercy’ speech from The Merchant of Venice. But Raison, too, gives a strong performance, all wide-eyed and heart-on-sleeve, similarly enjoying that slide between acting and acting acting.
With plenty of research which only occasionally clunks its way into the lines, Hare explores their relationship, definitely devoted and possibly sexual. He also shows us that even towards the end of their careers, their style was beginning to look outmoded. At first, the interruptions of Ruby Ashbourne Serkis and Jordan Metcalfe as Terry’s two children Edith and Edward seem out of place. Why do we care about these two slightly odd scions, one a radical feminist theatremaker and the other a radical theatre theorist?
But it becomes clear that they are the contrast to the dowdy old school of Irving; they are the modernism he rejects. By projecting forward in time, Hare can show how much and how quickly theatre has changed, and how the stage embraces or rejects the political tides that crash around them. Edgar works with Stanislavski and is admired by Peter Brook; Edith worships Sylvia Pankhurst, while the great liberal George Bernard Shaw lurks in the background.
It’s all good fun, a cheeky, self-referential and sometimes self-critical play. Never exceptional, but nor too dull, Hare’s play becomes a sweet panegyric, and a really traditional, really entertaining night both at the theatre and of the theatre.
