Faith Healer

Last weekend we saw again one of my favourite plays – the late Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer“. Though I have read it again in the interim I have not seen it since the splendid 1992 Royal Court production in London.

“Faith Healer” is a three hander but written in an unusual form – comprising as it does four long monologues, starting and ending with those of the play’s protagonist – the ‘Fantastic Francis Hardy’ (as the poster for the faith healer’s one-night performances in small towns and villages throughout Wales, Scotland and – fatally – Ireland has it).

I am not usually a big fan of the monologue (a fact that I have broadcast within these musings on more than one occasion) and particularly of the way that it forms the core of the majority of one-person shows. It seems to me in most instances to lack the dramatic power of dialogue, reducing the performance to a one-dimensional perspective. Now – there most certainly are exceptions to this generalisation, but they have to be exceptional to be so as the form itself mitigates against it.

That Friel’s masterpiece does so triumphantly only starts to become apparent some minutes into the second monologue – delivered by the faith healer’s English mistress, Grace – or is it his wife – and is she actually English after all? Even those familiar with the concept of the unreliable narrator will find it difficult to keep their feet as the play lurches from one telling of the tale to the next (the faith healer’s manager Teddy completes the trio) and even the faith healer’s own second monologue contradicts his first in vital respects.

The audience is left to try to pick the elements of truth from this tangled web of narratives – a brilliant device that renders the play instantly multi-dimensional and restores to the form one of the elements it most commonly lacks – that of subtext!

In the aforementioned 1992 Royal Court production a good friend played the part of Teddy – the which he was to repeat in the 2016 London revival to five star reviews. We were sadly unable to see the latter production – having already moved to Canada.

This latest production was live-streamed from an empty Old Vic in London as part of that wonderful institution’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic – “Old Vic: In Camera”. The theatre sold the same number of tickets (at heavily discounted prices) for Zoom streaming as the house usually seats and for “Faith Healer” there were just four live shows – which were not recorded. For us this meant watching the excellent Michael Sheen, Indira Varma and David Threlfall at 11:30 in the morning (that being 7:30 in the evening UK time) and it really did feel a little like being present at a live theatrical performance. It was – at any rate – about as close as we are going to be able to get anytime soon.

Our grateful thanks to all concerned for a wonderful and thought-provoking experience.