MOTHER MARY

And GRACE PERVADES at the Theatre Royal Haymarket

In my local tube station there is a poster for David Hare’s new play at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, a love letter to ye olde time theatrical luvvies Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the former an actor-manager and owner of the Lyceum Theatre (which is, incidentally, no more than 700m from the Theatre Royal Haymarket) and the latter his muse and sometime mistress, played by Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison. The poster for GRACE PERVADES is near the elevator bank and I have found myself looking at it from time to time, admiring Fiennes’ slender stockinged legs (he is dressed as Hamlet to Raison’s extravagantly wigged Ophelia), and considering the notion of great actors playing great actors playing Shakespeare’s greatest roles: a real theatrical flex. So, I thought to myself, a lauded titan of the British theatre establishment will use the final flick of his quill (okay, maybe not his final one, but he is fast approaching eighty, so…) to extol the virtues and supreme importance and value of… the British theatre establishment. How predictable. How very self-referential and self-regarding. And how boring, right? Not for me, thanks anyway.

What I have not seen in my local tube station, poster-wise, is any evidence of David Lowery’s MOTHER MARY, the other Anne Hathaway film (i.e. the other film of our present day Anne Hathaway, that is… not the film of the other Anne Hathaway, of Shakespeare’s Anne Hathaway…), which is as illusive and hidden as THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 is exhibitionist and exposed. I noted the release date for MOTHER MARY some weeks ago and determined to see it, and have since heard nothing. Not a whisper. Not really. Not for an A24 release starring a bona fide movie star and our own homegrown talent, Michaela Coel, and from the writer/director who gave us both GHOST STORY and THE GREEN KNIGHT. Odd, eh? It’s almost like they don’t want us to see it….

I searched for screenings and found the film was in limited release and playing at Picturehouse Central, checked to see what time I could go and… imagine my surprise when my diary revealed a prior evening commitment to see GRACE PERVADES at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Errrrmmmm…. WTAF?! How could this possibly be? Confused but married to the mission of MOTHER MARY, I decided to move around a few things and see the film at 3 pm, purchasing a ticket (£19.85!)… then dove into my e-mails to better understand if and when I had been so out of sorts as to buy the theatre ticket… discovering I had made the perplexing purchase all the way back in September 2025 when I was in New York… realising all things British look much better and more interesting when viewed from 3,000 miles away across the pond and it was the distance which had befuddled me into a decision which is at variance with my legendarily impeccable taste… then noting I’d put the performance in my diary while on EST and not GMT and so although it was recorded as 7.30 pm it was incorrect by five hours and I actually had a ticket for the 2.30 pm matinee (which is much more like me, tbh - I hate being out late when everyone is drunk and a bit scary… preferring to be the drunkest and scariest in the room whenever possible…)… then realised I could not be both at the theatre and at a film screening concurrently… and so went back onto the Picturehouse Centre site to purchase a second ticket for the 6 pm screening (another £19.85!).

And so I began yesterday upwards of £100 out of pocket to cram an entire working day into the morning to allow me to see a play I didn’t want to see and watch a film which seemingly does not want to be seen. It is not easy being me. 😩

GRACE PERVADES (the title is purloined from a theatre critic’s assessment of Ellen Terry’s stage presence which read, “Grace pervades the hussy…” in reference to her two illegitimate children by arts and crafts design hero William Godwin) is everything I expected it to be: very good British theatre celebrating very good British theatre for the benefit of a very good British theatre-going audience (and, if the overly enthusiastic applause mid-scene is anything to go by, a smattering of Americans). The text is clever and informed and sprinkled with a fine seasoning of Shakespeare’s best lines and roles, bonus mini-performances from Fiennes and Raison. The cast is pretty darn good, obvs (although no sexual chemistry whatsoever between the leads and I remain confused as to whether the pair, Irving and Terry, were or were not actually lovers… Answers on postcards, please!), and I thought the production designer did an absolutely bloody splendid job of miraculously making a theatre stage built in 1821 (i.e. the Theatre Royal Haymarket) look very persuasively like a theatre stage 700m away which was built in 1834 (bravo, guys!). So, my carefully considered review of GRACE PERVADES? There is nothing not to like about it, I suppose (as if anything more damning could be said of “art”….). ⭐️⭐️⭐️

And of MOTHER MARY? Well….. Where to begin? The film is ambitious and not at the same time, a mismatched melee of high concept body horror and performance spectacle in the midst of mostly very talky, onerous dialogue between pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) and Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), the costume designer she betrayed and abandoned as her star soared. It does not work at all, imo, misfiring on all cylinders and uneven in tone, text and style.

Having left the cinema, the film itself is not the thing occupying my mind. I don’t mind watching an independent film which strikes out, tbh: the weird and wacky alchemy that is filmmaking sometimes doesn’t work, a fact which only makes it all the more amazing when it does work, and I bear no grudge against filmmakers who take a big swing and miss (quite the opposite, really - they’re often my favourites). The thing which has my synapses firing is the relationship this film appears to possibly have with that other Anne Hathaway film, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2, maybe, and the Met Gala.

Two Anne Hathaway films are released within days of each other and here are some of the synapse-activating elements to consider:

• DWP (please note this is how I’ll henceforth refer to THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA franchise, 1 and 2, and it should not be misunderstood to be a reference to the Department of Water and Power… nor to the Department of Work and Pensions…) is about a fashion magazine

• Irl, Anna Wintour is the head honcho of Conde Nast and of the Met Gala, a glamorous event held for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute

• The Met Gala was last week, smack bang in the middle of these two films’ release dates (and Anne Hathaway was one of the BOGs, imo, in a hand-painted Michael Kors sartorial miracle of a dress)

• In DWP, Anna Wintour is parodied/praised as the character Miranda Priestly

• In DWP, pop star Lady Gaga performs at a fashion show in a wild costume

• In MM (please note this is how I’ll henceforth refer to MOTHER MARY and it should not be understood to be a reference to the candy coated chocolates… nor to my own Mother whose name was Margaret Mary and could conceivably be known as MM if not MMM…) the character of Mother Mary is pretty much Lady Gaga… right?

• In MM, the entire thrust of the plot is a Costume Designer tasked with urgently creating an amazing outfit for a Pop Star

• In DWP, the entirely mindblowingly over-egged marketing campaign (DWP eyebrows tweezers, anyone?) is doused in bright red, the signature colour of the franchise

• In MM the colour red is initially the only… errmmmm… red line drawn by Mother Mary - the dress can be anything Sam wants it to be, but it cannot be red… and it’ll be red, obvs (please refer to the poster image…)

All this to say, I feel deeply uncomfortable and ick-like when it comes to these overlapping factors and the relationship between 20th Century Studios’ $100M design-brand-hawking monstrosity, A24’s $20M independent film (which perhaps does not work, but which must be allowed to exist as a stand-alone entity, right? Or risk undermining the entire concept of cinema and singular feature films…) and the Met Gala. Something feels very, very wrong. If I were a cynic… and I am… I’d start to think A24 saw the opportunity to float MM into existence on the wing of DWP and the Met Gala. Perhaps they thought they were being very clever, offering an artsy-fartsy retort to the mega-phone-issued-consumerist manifesto that is the DWP franchise? Who knows what A24’s intention was, if any (could all this really be a coincidinc, though? Really?), but the result is to present an independent film as if it is the amuse bouche to a studio’s main fare… as if MM is the Met Gala’s minion… or its fluffer. And it has consequently left something of a bad taste in my mouth.

Or perhaps my cynicism has had the better of me and I am totes alone in these misgivings? More answers on more postcards, please.

⭐️⭐️