Grace Pervades, Grayson Perry Prevails

Two theatre visits have been ticked off my bucket list over the past few weeks, and they sit neatly alongside each other, even if they come from very different theatrical worlds: Grace Pervades by David Hare at the Theatre Royal Haymarket (27 June 2026), and Grayson, a new musical about Grayson Perry, seen in a work-in-progress presentation at Soho Theatre Walthamstow (18 July 2026).

The coincidence is almost comically neat: both share the initials GP, but they also form an unintended double bill about performance, identity and how lives are staged, either by history or in real time.

Grace Pervades by David Hare centres on Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, two defining figures of late Victorian theatre, portrayed here by Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison. Across 25 scenes spanning roughly 1878–1966, the play moves through a wry anthology of theatrical life: Russia, the Café Royal, Wolverhampton, rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms and the shifting spaces where performance is made and discussed rather than simply shown.

What emerges is less a conventional biographical drama than a meditation on theatrical temperament. Irving, the actor-manager, exists as someone for whom life is inseparable from theatre, while Terry, by contrast, is repeatedly positioned as someone who preferred life over theatre. That tension becomes the engine of the piece. There are small, precise comic revelations: the suggestion that Irving might improve his technique by looking at other actors rather than the audience, Edward Gordon Craig’s weary preference that productions “ideally never open” and Irving’s resistance to new writing and his refusal to stage Shaw. Each helps build a picture of a theatrical world that took itself seriously, but also understood the importance of image and reputation.

The play leaves you pondering the ephemerality of theatre. Victorian performance can never truly be recreated; it can only be glimpsed through fragments and interpretation. For all the fame and influence Irving and Terry enjoyed, their performances disappeared the moment they ended. What remains are the photographs, costumes, reviews and memories that attempt to preserve them.

Terry’s legacy is mediated in the play through the voices of her children, Edward Gordon Craig and Edie, much as her life is now curated at the National Trust’s Smallhythe Place, the home where she spent her later years. Irving’s reputation has also shifted over time. In his lifetime he was an international celebrity, with tens of thousands turning out to greet him during his American tours. Today, he is perhaps more likely to be encountered through his connection to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, having been one of the inspirations for the charismatic figure who fascinated Stoker while he worked alongside him at the Lyceum Theatre.

Set against that, Grayson, the new musical about Grayson Perry, feels like the opposite challenge.

Seen in a work-in-progress presentation at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, with music by Richard Thomas, book by Sara-Ella Ozbek and lyrics and life story by Perry himself, it is less concerned with recovering a lost presence than with staging a living one. Perry’s life is already heavily mediated through ceramics, television, writing, interviews and public persona, so the challenge is not reconstruction but translation into musical form.

The structure leans into a classic musical arc: from an Essex council estate upbringing, through persistent misfit status (“wrong class”, “wrong dress”, “wrong choices”), towards eventual recognition within the institutional art world. But it is not framed as a simple ascent. Instead it plays as a series of misalignments and reconfigurations, with identity repeatedly tested against class, taste, gender expectations and cultural acceptance.

Surreal and comic devices are used to externalise internal states, including a six-foot teddy bear named Alan who appears as a kind of life coach. This signals a willingness to move away from realism into a more playful and stylised form. Even at this stage of its development, the musical appears less interested in a straightforward biography than in dramatising the pressures involved in becoming yourself. The two actors playing Grayson also reveal the different stages of this journey. Jack Shalloo takes on the adult Perry, while Elliott Norrington plays the younger Grayson.

What links the two GP afternoons, unexpectedly, is their shared fascination with how identity is staged and refracted. Grace Pervades is about lives that once filled theatres but now survive only as fragments, reconstructed through history’s imperfect lens. Grayson is about a life that is already widely known, already narrated from multiple angles and now being reshaped again through musical theatre, an interesting choice for a story about outsider status given that the form itself has traditionally carried cultural, class and financial barriers.

As with many of the bio-pics I explored in my book Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures, both works play with the relationship between fact and fiction, compressing, reshaping and dramatising events to create energy, urgency and emotional coherence. For Irving and Terry, this means reconstructing a world that can only now be glimpsed through fragments and memories. For Perry, and for those around him whose lives intersect with his own, the challenge is altogether different: turning an unfolding life into drama while the people involved are still present, still evolving and still able to shape their own narratives.

One looks at performance after it has disappeared. The other explores what happens when a living identity is still evolving in front of us.