When Brian Friel’s Faith Healer opened on Broadway in 1979, it closed, critically trashed, after 20 performances. The Irish playwright told an interviewer: “You feel as you do about a sickly child for a panned play.” But the script, 45 years on, is one of Friel’s most beloved offspring, regularly revived on both sides of the Atlantic.
In each successful production, though, you can see what daunted earlier audiences. Faith Healer has the austere form of four more-or-less half-hour monologues. The first and last are delivered by Frank Hardy, who tours Celtic villages in a van, laying hands on the sick. He travels with Grace, his (depending on who you believe) mistress or wife, and Teddy, his agent and driver.
Many writers would have made Frank an obvious fake but Friel plays with our faith and doubts. The story circles an apparently miraculous Welsh event and a catastrophic gig in Ireland. Across the often contradictory monologues, facts fracture and we must construe them.
Any staging is an act of faith by a director in each actor’s ability, alone, to hold the auditorium focused for as long as the evening news. Rachel O’Riordan has found a wholly convincing trinity.
Declan Conlon crucially shows the raffish charisma that enables Frank to make a living from the sick but also the hollow cruelty inflicted on those closer. All three characters are depressive alcoholics and Justine Mitchell achingly conveys Grace’s dangerous combination of failing self-belief and surviving faith in Frank. Nick Holder persuasively suggests the agent is a frustrated music-hall act. Teddy’s tales of novelty dog and pigeon acts, often played as baffled anecdotes, become full-on standup comedy, delighting in finally finding an audience.
Friel suggested that Frank might be a metaphor for the creative artist: blessed or cursed with an elusive “gift”. But, as this version explores, there are also interpretations political (confident mountebanks recently proving popular with electorates); medical (the “placebo effect”, in which fake pills achieve treatment); and religious, with some aspects of Frank defying easy science.
Friel, once a trainee priest, died an avowed non-Catholic but his plays, illustrating sayings about the difficulty of escaping the faith, are marked with liturgical and scriptural references. O’Riordan’s production makes these powerfully specific, with Conlon strongly suggesting that Frank – whether from drunkenness, exhaustion or something in his spirit – craves some kind of calvary. With Mitchell and Holder making their characters agonised evangelists, the show, in its emotional and narrative intensity, most resembles a spoken version of a Bach Passion.
• At the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 13 April
