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Grace Pervades (Playscript)
The extraordinary lives of the great Victorian actors Ellen Terry and Henry Irving are unveiled in David Hare’s sweeping family drama.
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Summary
People arguing, that isn’t theatre. People making points. And what’s more, you and I don’t belong in drawing rooms. Drawing rooms can’t contain us. We need courts and palaces and cathedrals. There’s scale for us there. We can move our elbows. Little rooms give us no space.
Henry Irving believes that theatre is the only thing that matters. Ellen Terry believes it’s more important to be a decent human being. Ellen’s daughter Edith Craig believes theatre can change society, but her son Edward Gordon Craig dreams only of a theatre free from actors and dialogue. Together, but in very different ways, they develop the paths which lead to the modern British theatre.
David Hare’s magnificent play opened at Theatre Royal Bath, in June 2025.
David Hare’s wry and elegant love letter to theatre . . . [is] a work of considerable intelligence.
Hare has done [Irving and Terry] proud. Heartfelt, truly feminist and funny, Grace Pervades shows how character is made, on and off? stage.
David Hare’s new drama is driven by some fundamental arguments — what is theatre for? What defines it, sustains it and why does it matter? It’s fascinating territory and Hare’s play is constantly absorbing . . . [and] affectionately funny on the craft of making theatre — the grind, the sweat, the dressing room doubts and rehearsal room rows — but he also touchingly pays tribute to the legacy that he and the company have inherited.
A play of pervasive insight that successfully evokes a bygone era of tremendous thespian industry, innovation and celebrity . . . The script – Hare’s dialogue is characteristically crisp – catches the handed-on wonders of the art form, along with its innate requirement to change.
DavidHare
David Hare has written over thirty stage plays and thirty screenplays for film and television. The plays include Plenty, Pravda (with Howard Brenton), The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy’s View, The Blue Room, Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens, The Absence of War, The Judas Kiss, The Red Barn, The Moderate Soprano, I’m Not Running and Beat the Devil. For cinema, he has written The Hours, The Reader, Damage, Denial, Wetherby and The White Crow among others, while his television…
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