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Here’s a warm, entertaining love-letter to a blended family of British theatrical pioneers, in which Ralph Fiennes sends himself up delightfully. He plays Henry Irving in David Hare’s play - the Victorian actor-manager who made the English theatre respectable and was the first of his trade to be knighted.
The joke is that Fiennes and Irving, both popular stars with an unwavering commitment to the stage, also both project a pained seriousness of manner. Here, in 1878, Irving recruits the semi-retired Ellen Terry (Miranda Raison) to support his new project, to revive London’s moribund Lyceum theatre with Shakespeare and other classics, knowing he needs her charm to offset his dourness.
Raison gives a performance of impish, provoking vivacity but is rarely required to be anything more than a foil and a feed – and possibly a lover - to Irving. In art as in life Terry, who should be the main character, is the supporting role.
Hare’s title comes from a review of one of her performances: “Grace pervades the hussy.” A child star of the theatre, Terry had a loveless marriage at 16 to the painter GF Watts then bore two illegitimate children with architect Edward William Godwin, who promptly abandoned her.
Edward Gordon Craig and Edith Craig (they chose the surname together) joined Irving’s Lyceum company and themselves became more or less successful theatrical ground-breakers and pioneers of unconventional relationships. They appear here to tell the audience directly and repeatedly how brilliant their mother was and to indicate how Irving’s bid to make the theatre respected and relevant continued into the 20th century and beyond.
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Hare’s play is heavy on exposition. Jordan Metcalfe’s fussy “Teddy” and Ruby Ashbourne Serkis’s insouciant “Edy” explain who they are at the start. The dialogue is as full of scene-setting as the title cards over the stage that tell us we are in Boston in 1883, Hamburg in 1904 or Kent in 1922.
Grace Pervades is also stuffed with in-jokes and insider allusions that will be meat and drink to theatre nerds (like me). There’s an amusing expression of the grandstanding, declamatory Victorian style from which Terry tried to dislodge Irving, and a chance to see Fiennes in tights and cloak as Hamlet, and not one but two wigs as Malvolio. There are lots of references to The Bells, the now-forgotten melodrama that made Irving’s name and which he performed in Wolverhampton, the night before he died in 1905.
Terry’s famous costume as Lady Macbeth is recreated, as are Teddy’s sets for his vainglorious attempt to put his theories for a director-led theatre of movement and design into practice at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912. Edy’s bid to create a feminist stage movement with her two lesbian lovers at Terry’s house in Small Hythe facilitates snarky asides about the Pankhursts and the sexual voracity of Vita Sackville West. Isadora Duncan – one of Teddy’s many babymothers – flits by.
Hare’s wit is tuned here to a minor key, suited to Fiennes’s deadpan delivery and Raison’s ironic sparkle. I’ll long savour his Irving telling her Ellen that the arrogant Teddy has become so unpopular, as a young actor at the Lyceum, that “the other spear-carriers threw him from the battlements of Elsinore”.
Jeremy Herrin’s light-footed production has grandly simple sets by Bob Crowley and a profligately large cast. It started during the season that Fiennes programmed at the stately Bath Theatre Royal and sits sumptuously in the historic Haymarket. (Shame they couldn’t shift The Lion King out of the Lyceum: the names of Terry and Irvine are inscribed on its rear wall, as is that of Bram Stoker, who was the venue’s business manager and wrote Dracula as a possible role for his boss.)
Some may wonder why the once-radical Hare is wallowing in heritage theatre, but in fact this is anything but. Under all the period trappings and self-referential lines it’s a celebration of the protean spirit of the stage and the committed, charismatic, animating figures – like Irving and Fiennes – who keep it alive and push it forward. Sit back, relax, enjoy.
Grave Pervades is at Theatre Royal Haymarket to 4 July - buy tickets
