All the world on one stage

Sir David Hare's new play, currently in Bath, examines what theatre means and the legacy of the great names from the Victorian era, as an old Eugene O'Neill receives a fine revival

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I ENVY the people of Bath. They possess in the Theatre Royal not only a beautiful building, but also a playhouse with a temptingly varied programme. Its latest coup is to have engaged Ralph Fiennes to present a three-play season that kicks off with the premiere of David Hare's Grace Pervades that offers a witty, elegant and engrossing meditation on theatre itself. Its ostensible subject is Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and her family, but, in reality, it is about the influences that have shaped theatre as we know it today.

Sir David's play is based on a series of oppositions. Irving, the great Victorian actor-manager who gave theatre a new respectability, passionately claims: 'I am my work. What else am I?' Terry, his leading lady at the Lyceum and sometime lover, believes equally strongly in the power of personal relations. Her two illegitimate children by the architect Edward William Godwin offer a similarly strong contrast. Her son, Teddy (Edward Gordon Craig), is an artistic visionary who imagines a theatre liberated from actors and words and her daughter, Edith, is a pioneering feminist who believes theatre should have a social purpose and who creates a company that puts on 150 plays in 10 years.