Enter the Old Vic Studio, and you no longer feel as if you are in a theatre. All disbelief is instantly suspended, and you are in a dilapidated church hall in a remote village on the Celtic Fringes. The hall has uncomfortable chairs and a dead-fly sadness, and on the back wall a tatty banner proclaims: "The Fantastic Francis Hardy, Faith Healer, One Night Only." In front of us an unremarkable Irishman, dressed in a shabby suit, begins to talk quietly. The names of obscure Scottish and Irish villages drop from his lips in a litany, like verbal rosary beads that he clings to for dear life. This is Frank Hardy (Finbar Lynch), and although you know you could reach out and touch him, there is something of the ghost about him.
Frank tells us of a lifetime spent travelling in the back of a van with his Yorkshire-born mistress, Grace, and manager, Teddy, dispensing miracle cures. There was the night in Glamorgan when 10 bedridden people took up their beds and walked; the spot in northern Scotland where Grace's stillborn baby was delivered and buried by Frank in a corner of the field. But can we believe all Frank tells us? After all, this is a man – described by Grace as "an artist" – who has no faith in his own mysterious and irregular gift, and even less in those who come to see him.
Brian Friel's 1979 play is a mysterious, unsettling thing, less like a play than a summoning. These four monologues, spoken by the three unreliable narrators, curl around each other like incense at an exorcism. You have to listen hard and search beneath the words because Friel messes not just with time, but with your head, too. In whom should we have faith? Lynch's quietly charismatic Frank, who reels us in like a fisherman? Kathy Kiera Clarke's nervy Grace, taut as a violin string, who sits in her Paddington bedsit smoking and casting doubt? She clearly doesn't come from Yorkshire.
Or perhaps Richard Bremmer's showstopper, Teddy, who tells of a bagpipe- playing whippet, and who offers another version of events. Teddy speaks with a showbizzy brio, but exudes a bruised sadness, and sheds little light on what happened in the Donegal lounge bar where Frank's homecoming turned to something unspeakable. Simon Godwin offers an unshowy production of one of the most quietly powerful and influential of Irish plays of the last 30 years. It is an evening of pure sorcery about the nature of faith, the mysterious source of theatre itself, and the fictions we desperately weave to believe in ourselves.
