Grace Pervades: Ralph Fiennes as Henry Irving at the Theatre Royal Haymarket

What Grace Pervades is about

David Hare’s Grace Pervades is a play about the most famous working partnership of the Victorian stage: the actor-manager Henry Irving and the actress Ellen Terry, who led the company at the Lyceum Theatre in London from 1878 into the first years of the twentieth century. Ralph Fiennes played Irving and Miranda Raison played Terry, first at the Theatre Royal Bath in the summer of 2025 and then in a limited season of Grace Pervades at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, from 24 April to 11 July 2026.

Hare does not tell the story in a straight line. Much of it reaches the audience through Terry’s two children, Edith Craig and Edward Gordon Craig, who grew up in the Lyceum’s shadow and went on to change the theatre themselves. Edith became a director, producer and costume maker and was active in the campaign for women’s suffrage. Edward became the designer and theorist whose ideas about the stage travelled as far as Moscow. Through them the play keeps jumping forward, and the question underneath the anecdotes is a simple one: what did those two old stars actually leave behind once the gaslight went out?

Irving is the engine of the evening. Born John Henry Brodribb in Somerset in 1838, he turned a melodrama called The Bells into a sensation in 1871, took over the Lyceum seven years later and in 1895 became the first actor to be knighted. Hare’s Irving is magnificent and difficult in equal measure, a man who lived for the theatre and seemed to have very little left over for anything else. Terry is the counterweight: warmer, quicker, funnier, and often the one who quietly puts him right. One of the biggest laughs at Bath came from exactly such a correction.

Around them Hare places the people who would carry the stage into the next century. Stanislavski appears, played by Guy Paul, and George Bernard Shaw hovers at the edge of things, the critic who championed Terry and never stopped attacking Irving. The design keeps the Victorian frame visible: Bob Crowley’s set opens on a company of a dozen actors inside a proscenium arch, and Peter Mumford’s lighting does a good deal of the storytelling.

This is the third time Hare has written for Ralph Fiennes. Beat the Devil, a monologue drawn from Hare’s own experience of Covid, played at the Bridge Theatre in 2020, and Straight Line Crazy, with Fiennes as the New York planner Robert Moses, followed there in 2022 before crossing to The Shed in New York. A Ralph Fiennes play written by Hare has become something close to a fixture, and this one is the most openly about the job of acting itself.