The facts are never nailed down in Brian Friel's 1979 play about an itinerant faith-healer, Frank, who, with his companion Grace and manager Teddy, travels the remote villages of Wales and Scotland. Is Frank a miracle worker, whose unreliable gift is scuppered by booze and self-doubt – or merely a showbiz charlatan? Is Grace his wife, as she insists, or his mistress? What precisely were the details surrounding the birth of their child, or the tragic events that took place one September dawn in the Irish village of Ballybeg (the mythical Donegal village that features in so many of Friel's plays)?
Nothing is certain in Friel's masterpiece about the unreliability of memory and of storytellers, including playwrights. What is certain is just how much Irish playwriting of the last 30 years owes to this beautiful and elusive work, which takes the form of four monologues that curl around each other like wisps of smoke. Words are a kind of haunting here, unfleshed ghosts – as indeed are the characters themselves.
The plain grace of the writing is matched by the simplicity of Robin Lefèvre's fluid production, the first of three Friel revivals produced by Dublin's Gate theatre that will be seen in Edinburgh this summer. There is a touch of Osborne's Archie Rice about Kim Durham's cockney impresario, Teddy, and a contained desperation in the coiled quietness of Ingrid Craigie's Grace. Owen Roe's chatty, easygoing Frank has the flabby demeanour of a man who drinks too much, but something else, too: the sadness of a fallen angel.
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