Most of the plays I see come with a story I already know. So when one comes along that I know nothing about, I try to keep it that way, I don’t look it up or read around it. I go in properly blind.

That was the case with Grace Pervades. We booked for Ralph Fiennes rather than David Hare, our only reference point being Straight Line Crazy (also with Fiennes), which I didn’t especially enjoy. My ignorance going in was such that I’d assumed Grace Pervades was a person, Spanish or Mexican, perhaps.

It is not. It’s a play about the Victorian actors Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. The title comes from a contemporary description of Terry, admiring her talent while taking a pointed swipe at her private life: “Grace pervades the hussy.”

According to the play, Terry and Irving are architects of today’s theatre. Under Irving’s stewardship, the Lyceum became a thriving venue of lavish productions, part of a wider effort to make theatre “respectable” again. It seems I have Irving to thank for my little blog.

And the play really works on this level. The scenes between Terry and Irving are fascinating, especially when the expected hierarchy flips, and Terry, ostensibly subordinate, ends up teaching Irving how to act.

But not all elements are as easily accessible. I was grateful for having recently heard Harriet Walter speak about her book She Speaks. Some of Terry’s lines, her desire to play Rosalind, for instance, landed with a bit more context. It made me realise how much of an insider play this is. I consider myself fairly well versed, and with a son doing A-level drama I’ve had more than my share of practitioner talk over dinner, yet I still struggled to follow many of the references, a passing snigger about Peter Brook left me completely in the dark.

But even that isn’t really the play’s problem. The issue is what it becomes as it goes on. As it progresses, it fragments, covering too much and not quite enough. The children’s scenes feel oddly self-contained, running alongside rather than feeding into the central relationship. The second half, in particular, grows disjointed, in addition to rushing through time as if ticking off what needs to happen to get us to the ends of their lives.

This isn’t a performance issue. Jordan Metcalfe is very funny as the pompous Teddy, and Ruby Ashbourne Serkis brings a warm, easy likeability to Edith. But we never get close enough to either of them, or to their ideas. Instead, they end up pulling focus away from what’s most compelling, Irving and Terry.

And that feels like a structural misjudgment, because I could see what the play was trying to do. Teddy’s stripped-back, almost actor-less vision of theatre should stand in direct opposition to Irving’s grand, illusion-heavy spectacle, a generational shift as the central tension.

But the play never quite lets that argument come alive. Teddy is drawn with such ridicule, his ideas treated as faintly absurd, that it doesn’t feel like an invitation for the audience to engage or weigh the merits. The ideas sit side by side, one gently mocked, the other never meaningfully challenged.

What should be a debate becomes a comparison. It feels like a missed opportunity. Theatre, of all places, should be able to stage that kind of argument, to invent a stand-off between Irving and Teddy, if that’s what this play is seeking to explore.

But perhaps more fundamentally, I found myself resisting the premise altogether. I’m not sure I need theatre to tell me what theatre is meant to be. I just want it to be, absorbing, magical, capable of holding me in a moment and not letting go. If we’re looking for something to debate, I’d personally start with why everything now seems destined to become a musical. That feels far more pressing.

None of that takes away from Fiennes. He’s excellent, mesmerising. But even he couldn’t quite stave off my yawns by the end, and I kept thinking back to him as Macbeth, with Varma as his Lady, in place of this Grace.