Ok, I just got this working. I thought is was related to sitemesh and artifacts being included from the main template layout. But it came down to the 'url' and 'editurl' options on the grid not pointing to a full path. During initial render I was using just the action name of the grails controller ('itemList') which worked great. but after redirect things broke. When I changed to 'url' and 'editurl' to use the grails createLink tag url=${createLink(action: 'itemList')} things worked after the redirect.