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.
