Latest news with #GracePervades
ITV News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- ITV News
Back the Bard! Actor Ralph Fiennes alarmed by idea of removing Shakespeare from schools
Don't ask Ray Fiennes to wear a microphone on stage! At least not on the stage we are sitting on right now. We are at the Theatre Royal in Bath, where the renowned actor and director has been given a season of productions to run. We are talking about the growing trend of actors being given microphones on stage - and the impact this has on their projection. He concedes that in some locations, for example huge venues, microphones can be useful, but pointing at the size of the Georgian theatre we are sitting in, it is not he firmly says, necessary. Having been invited to host a season at the Theatre Royal, he now finds himself performing in a new David Hare play, Grace Pervades, in the evening, and then going into intense rehearsals for the next production As You Like It, which he is directing. For this play, he has invited his friend and fellow Shakespearean Dame Harriet Walter to be part of the cast, she will be playing the traditional male role of Jacques, but tells me she hasn't quite decided what gender the character will be. It will be an unusual dynamic for her, being directed by a fellow great, but both are utterly committed to presenting the Bard's work on stage. With a review of the national curriculum in schools and colleges currently underway, they are both alarmed at the suggestions that Shakespeare is no longer relevant to be taught in schools. Fiennes describes the idea as 'stupidity'. His decision to host a season at the Theatre Royal in Bath is an interesting one, given the current crisis that some regional theatres are facing. Both say they have been stating the case for increased funding for the creative sector for decades. Fiennes says he looks at places like France and Spain and sees the level of state support that the cultural industries get there. He is backing the creation of a new theatre in St Albans, which involves renovating a 17th century barn. The idea is to give young up-and-coming talent a chance to get a foothold in the industry. And back to the discussions on the relevance of Shakespeare, the one thing that actors strive to do, is perform Shakespeare on stage. After As You Like It, he will be back on stage for his third production in the season - again a brand-new play, Small Hotel, in which he'll be acting alongside his former partner Francesca Annis. To say that Ralph Fiennes is prolific would seem an understatement right now, with three films out in the last year including 28 Years Later. His season here in Bath finishes in mid October and then be starring in a Hunger Games film prequel, out next year. He is, he admits, a workaholic.
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Grace Pervades review – Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison exceptional as Victorian stage stars
When fielding letters from theatregoers bewildered by the titles of David Hare's 1990 plays Racing Demon and Skylight, the director Richard Eyre told the playwright that in future he should explain them. Grace Pervades usefully provides an epigraph: 'Grace pervades the hussy.' Even so, Hare still requires us to know, or Google, that this line comes from a review of the great actor Ellen Terry, who is portrayed here by Miranda Raison with Ralph Fiennes as her mentor, the senior British theatrical, Henry Irving. 'Hussy', which would these days rightly get a reviewer removed from the Critics' Circle, referred to her two children 'out of wedlock' and her long affair with the married Irving. Hare feared his temperament too sensitive for the very-public and judged medium of theatre. Grace Pervades, his 32nd full-length play, at the age of 78, is an amused and bemused meditation on why he – and his characters – put themselves through it to the extent that Irving died of an actual coronary very soon after acting one. In what also feels like an autobiographical grace note to Hare's many state of the nation plays, someone bemoans 'the stupid English sense of humour that stops them doing anything.' The 25 scenes spanning 1878-1966 allow Hare a wry anthology of theatrical attitudes. He can rarely have won a bigger laugh than when Terry delicately suggests Sir Henry might tweak his technique to look at other actors rather than the audience when speaking. Ellen's son, Edward Gordon Craig, the theatrical equivalent of architects who would rather sketch buildings than erect them, confides, after three years of Moscow rehearsals: 'Ideally, we would never open.' Irving's life is theatre; Terry prefers living. An in-joke has Sir Henry refusing to stage the 'ridiculous' As You Like It; Fiennes, in a season as an Irvingesque actor-manager, directs it on this Bath stage next month. Grace Pervades' director Jeremy Herrin and designer Bob Crowley smoothly move between multiple locations from Russia via the Cafe Royal to Wolverhampton. There is sometimes the bio-drama fault that everyone is historical: a ballet interlude introduces Isadora Duncan, who's sleeping with one character, while another laments she has just been 'frigged' and dumped by Vita Sackville-West. Such, though, were these circles. Much as aristocrats in modern period dramas are made to sound less posh than they were to avoid alienating the audience, the actors, in the performance extracts, play down the more histrionic acting style of those times. Although Terry, in a dressing room teasing scene, mimics what Victorians really heard – Irving's Shylock booming 'cut-throat dog' as 'cut-thrut dug' – Fiennes finds a vegan alternative to his honeyed ham. This sensibly avoids satirising the hero but also allows Fiennes, a poetic but naturalistic speaker of exceptional clarity, to treat us to flashes of Malvolio, Cardinal Wolsey and Hamlet. Raison's vignettes as Beatrice and Portia showcase both Terry's talent and her own. Irving disapproved of new plays – Fiennes speaks the name of George Bernard Shaw as if it were the period expletive, 'Pshaw!' – and so would never have staged Grace Pervades, but it is a work of considerable intelligence and elegance in which he and Terry could have given great pleasure, as does Hare. At Theatre Royal Bath until 19 July
