Latest news with #MirandaRaison
Telegraph
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Grace Pervades, review: Ralph Fiennes is utterly compelling in David Hare's smart new play
For all his routinely acclaimed screen performances (latterly Conclave, Odysseus and 28 Years Later), Ralph Fiennes is a consummate theatre animal. And he lays claim to that terrain with zeal in an ambitious three-pronged season in Bath that begins with him incarnating – in accomplished style – one of the giants of the Victorian stage – Henry Irving (1838-1905). Grace Pervades, a new play by David Hare (with whom he has collaborated much of late), centres on the professional and personal relationship that flowered between Irving and fellow luminary Ellen Terry during his gilded tenure (1878-1899) running the Lyceum in London. With Miranda Raison (formerly of Spooks fame) bringing charm and, yes, grace to the role of actress Terry, there's ample to snare our attention. Do we need so much on shifting theatre trends? No, but that's no reason to miss out on a play of pervasive insight that evokes a bygone era of tremendous thespian industry, innovation and celebrity. Irving – the first actor to be awarded a knighthood – had his detractors as well as his admirers, the latter group including the Telegraph's Clement Scott, who hailed his Hamlet as a 'noble contribution to dramatic art'. Interestingly, Hare puts some of the fiercest criticism of Irving's limitations – his mind more impressive than his body – in the actor's own mouth. Fiennes's stiff, stooped Irving, with dragging leg and scholarly sweep of hair, woos Terry to join his Lyceum venture on the basis that her joyful radiance will compensate for his natural tendency to dourness (Fiennes is now a past master at a tragicomic air of careworn melancholy). That his instincts about Terry are correct gets amply proven in Jeremy Herrin's fleet production (replete with scenic transformations): in swift succession, a decorously attired, refulgent Raison spellbinds as Portia, Lady Macbeth and Viola. Prone to some self-doubt too, Terry frets that Irving's silence about her Ophelia is a sign of dislike; in fact, it's because he is awed by her perfection, unwavering even though her rendition alters every night. The script – Hare's dialogue characteristically crisp – catches the handed-on wonders of the artform, along with its innate requirement to change. But there's something muted about the pair's contretemps over Terry's under-nourishing supporting roles and frustrated yearning to play Rosalind (one notes that Fiennes directs As You Like It next). Nor do we get to see this leading classical actor donning the mantle of Irving the full-blooded Shakespearean. The focus darts away often – too often – to Terry's estimable (illegitimate) offspring – Edward Gordon Craig and Edith Craig. Jordan Metcalfe is enjoyably bumptious as theatre's self-appointed, theorising saviour, while Ruby Ashbourne Serkis is more likeably grounded as his equally artistic sister, her bohemian ménage a trois sketched in too, with Isadora Duncan and Stanislavsky factored in on top. Hare is too good a writer for us to feel he has bitten off more than we can chew. But he could afford to give the power-couple romance at the evening's heart even more room to breathe, and blaze.
Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Grace Pervades review — Ralph Fiennes is magnetic
A great contemporary actor plays a great late-Victorian actor manager. Does the notion of Grace Pervades, a new play by David Hare starring Ralph Fiennes as Henry Irving, sound like theatre eating itself? It is a bit, though Fiennes is too magnetic and Hare's script too stacked with bon mots and insights ever to be less than interesting. Irving ran the Lyceum Theatre in London from 1878 to 1902, plying a proudly old-fashioned programme of great plays featuring great roles for Henry Irving. And Grace Pervades starts Fiennes's own season of actor-managing, directing As You Like It in August here before starring with his ex Francesca Annis in a new play, Small Hotel, in October. The play's best moments revolve around Irving's relationship, largely professional, with his leading lady, Ellen Terry. In fact you can't help but wish all of its moments were about them and there was less time spent on her theatrical offspring, Edward Gordon Craig and Edith Craig. Partly that's because Fiennes, donning a series of ever-whitening wigs, is sincere, caustic, reserved, repressed, vain, generous — whatever the moment requires — and you wish for as much as you can get of him. Miranda Raison, as Ellen Terry, is engagingly elegant but the character feels like a foil to Irving MARC BRENNER Fiennes shows Irving the actor-micromanager, fastidiously controlling except when it comes to Terry. She can do whatever she likes. Miranda Raison lends Terry an engagingly elegant lightness but struggles, I think, to inhabit fully a character who feels like a foil to the more tunnel-visioned Irving, much though she pulls him up on his foibles. • David Hare interview: 'I have been heartily kicked by the BBC' Time that might have fleshed out this pair more is instead spent following the influential yet seemingly impossible Edward and the crusading Edith, who produces huge numbers of plays while living in a menage a trois in Kent. Every exchange has something going for it, but you wonder what all these character studies and theatrical theories are supposed to add up to. Still, a large cast rises to the challenges of a production, by Jeremy Herrin, played out on a huge area with visible wings and proscenium arch upstage (design by Bob Crowley). Jordan Metcalfe gives Edward a prim perfectionism that makes it easier to buy into this self-proclaimed genius as a great postulator than a great libertine. Bohemian Edith is played with name-making aplomb in her professional theatre debut by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis. (Suitably enough, in a play about theatrical dynasties, she is the child of two successful actors, Lorraine Ashbourne and Andy Serkis.) The cast rises to the challenge of the production MARC BRENNER Do we ever quite know what the story of these differently driven, devotedly theatrical types is supposed to make us feel? Not really. And it's one of those plays that changes time and place often enough that characters spend too much time reminding each other who they are and what they are about. But take it on its own slightly rambling terms and Grace Pervades has far too many ideas in its head ever to be dull.★★★☆☆ 150mins Bath Theatre Royal, to Jul 19, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
