FringeReview UK 2026
Saving Grace
Lewes Little Theatre
Genre: Comedic, Community Theatre, Contemporary, Costume, Drama, LGBT, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Lewes Little Theatre, Lancaster Street
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Philip Ayckbourn’s Saving Grace, an exploration of what it means to save everyone including yourself, premieres at Lewes Little Theatre directed by Ayckbourn till October 17.
Philip Ayckbourn’s finest play to date.
Review
A woman sits mute on the grass, elsewhere. She’s been mute though since a week before she turned 14, 25 years ago. And she stopped playing the piano at the same time. Why is it then that five other characters seek to colonise her; and project their desires? They have Grace in mind, but not, perhaps in hers. Philip Ayckbourn’s Saving Grace, an exploration of what it means to save everyone including yourself, premieres at Lewes Little Theatre directed by Ayckbourn till October 17.
Saving everyone might seem too late. Since it’s the end of the world this bright July afternoon, according to at least three of the six characters onstage. But as we know the end of the world keeps recalibrating. So perhaps we have a few weeks.
Ayckbourn’s plays speculate playfully, comically but always with a small searing hot-iron for the unwary. He probes how mundanity survives round the edge of consciousness: what for some are paranormal and others purely psychological phenomena. At other times Ayckbourn’s outright sci-fi invention plays tricks with his characters. Here the only sci-fi element is about to get a good kicking. And he starts with a suburban garden lawn. Familiar, anyone? That’s going to get a kicking too.
Grace (Victoria Brewer) is clearly under siege, and expresses a remarkable degree of difference, even dissent, to every vocal foray others throw at her. Brewer’s is a masterful performance of listening and inner listening: and springs surprises. At one moment, as others burble, she starts miming the piano: an early (Op 9) slow Chopin Nocturne, or a Bach two-part invention or sarabande, I thought, and told my neighbour. It’s a tribute to Brewer and Ayckbourn that this was literally the case, as we find out. That kind of detail is a tribute to this company.
There’s Grace’s doubly displaced brother Matthew (Jon Terry), who’s left his wife and child to move in in a now fuschia-coloured old bedroom in the family home; and take up childhood where he reluctantly left off. He’s recovered his train set and teddy-bear Nigel. Model trains feature throughout as this hapless man-child affably bumbles with that occasional literalness famously given to stock innocents. Underneath though is a slightly bleak recognition. Terry is quietly sublime in this, nailing that faintly hangdog self-recognition and faded boyhood: understating should never be underestimated.
First to arrive in the garden is wife-fleeing neighbour Eric (Michael Bucke). As his wife audibly shrieks behind the wall, Eric, sensitive to Grace’s voice as he thinks, makes palpable moves on her, and throughout the play, near-declarations, forestalled by other arrivals. His liberal, alert persona is though in conflict with his – and perhaps her – intent. First a bottle of champagne for an end-of-world party he doesn’t quite believe in (Matthew leans the same way though keeps declaring the countdown); then a bunch of flowers he curiously fails to relinquish. Perhaps the white ones are narcissi. Bucke’s Eric, always tensed to a declaration, delivers hidden shallows later.
Vinegarish Chloe (a mercilessly unsympathetic Victoria Hasted) delivering sweet cakes with mung/aduki bean additions, sweetens herself and Grace only. They’re the elect, she declares, speaking for Grace for whom she’s fashioned an amulet. The pair are to be beamed up by their uber-race’s spaceship out of range of inferior species as the sun goes out; for no astronomical reason Chloe cares to think about. Such people exist and Chloe’s brand seems here to have created a stir strong enough to expand its end-of-world cultishness to large swathes of the population; if this garden is a fair sample. Hasted bristles with a magnificent impatience for underlings and a rapt self-regard, arms supplicant to the gods descending.
Her first cake’s nemesis Frances (Helen Halliday) wafts on with a superiority born of a more sensible self-love; the world isn’t going anywhere so no wonder Chloe hates her, Matthews fears her later gambit to move into the house, and even Eric, wibbling hostility, senses danger. Halliday’s seraphic persona alternates with an adamantine clarity of purpose. Frances too is fleeing her violent girlfriend Holly; needs refuge and escape with a close friend. Frances’ suggestions are palpably more sensible than her rivals; but like everyone else, she wants Grace saved for her: proposing a cultural centre with spa elements. Vinegary Chloe can’t help sprinkling on that parade. The second-act stand-off provokes a fantastic childhood regression amongst the ensemble that has to be seen.
Lucas August playing Grace’s uffish husband Jonathan first stalks diagonally across the stage and off: like Alec Guinness in Habeas Corpus, one director noted. And makes a similar impression. He barely speaks, and that gutturally, before a plot-point with a bang sends him offstage for much of the show. When he returns, much changed – with a genuine vision attested by one other character, something Chloe could never attain – August’s full force is unleashed. First physically then vocally. His is a burnished delivery, slow as a wicket-splitting ball. Here’s a magisterial speech of transcendence – not without its flaws and lingering self-regard: disguised in a St John Rivers mode of do-gooding. Yet you see a genuine shift. That’s too much for one character.
By this time though Brewer’s Grace shifts too, as she gives a phenomenal performance with quite extraordinary qualities (no spoiler). This is a play with fleeting quotes from other plays, wholly absorbed both in a personal language and original plot. Grace herself has few analogues: Katrin in Mother Courage being one. Starting with what can only seem a sly homage to one of his father’s masterpieces, Woman in Mind, Ayckbourn flips it over. Instead of a woman’s fantasies after a medical accident, it’s everyone else’s projections on a woman’s perceived disability that provides an engine of comedy – and profundity.
Starting by parking his trainset on his father’s lawn so to speak, with elements that set up then refuse to perform (say) Round and Round the Garden, the intricately constructed Act Two emphatically delivers several surprises, shifts in character and an epilogue to catch you off-guard. You realise precisely why this is set in the old family home, that train-sets and teddy-bears aren’t the only adjuncts of the past.
Ayckbourn’s set, designed by himself and (as ever) built in-house, features realistic sandstone walls and a grass-covered stage. There’s a cloud-subtled sky: we move through July, August and September in Trevor Morgan’s ever-sovereign lighting design. His sound is where some ambushes lie.
“The finest LLT production I’ve seen” declared one director who’d not visited for some time, having acted on this stage. In truth several recent productions have been superb. But her other point, that this is a work that should travel, and is both profound and brilliantly constructed, is incontestable.
Ayckbourn’s showing how Grace is saving, having already saved herself, is how the genuinely epiphanic close comes across. Only one character now truly sees Grace, but she’s seen everyone else, and perhaps helped them save themselves by un-illusioning them, a point the same director also made. A deeply satisfying play, it grounds the everyday with something like a beatification from elsewhere. And on the evidence I’ve seen, it’s Ayckbourn’s finest play to date.
Stage Manager Joanne Cull, ASM Esme Gatton, Wardrobe LLT Wardrobe Team, Set Builds LLT Set Build Team, Photography Keith Gilbert and Phil Gazzard, Trailer Production Team Nathan Croft, One Studio Picture.
