Brian Friel makes it look like the most natural thing in the world. Three people telling the same story from their point of view. Three monologues. Yet Faith Healer, first staged in 1979, is a daring and complicated drama. A dismantling of a traditional play, a juggling with ideas of truth and lies, a swimming between realism and dream. A challenge to the audience. A test of our faith in what we see and hear.
In Lyndsey Turner’s luminescent production, Stephen Dillane is a marvel as the healer. Teasingly, misleadingly called Frank, he travels the countryside, sometimes bringing off a cure. Rumpled, hands in pockets, he ruminates without obvious flash or patter. He talks of his gift as if it were an extra character, an unreliable gate-crasher. It is his eloquence, seemingly accidental, that magnetises: steady melancholy, lyrical passages, acerbic asides.
His wife (or is she? Frank introduces her as his “mistress”) is poignantly called Grace. In a devastating moment, Frank calmly says her unswerving loyalty sits on him “like dust”. Her loving explanation is that he made people believe that his story was their story. She lived by what he saw in her. Gina McKee plays her with delicacy and understated anguish. Her existence sinks under the weight of Frank’s words.
Ron Cook is immaculate: contained but utterly revealing as the manager. Apparently straightforward and practical, he compares the healer’s gift to one of his previous acts: a very talented whippet. In bow tie and bad brown trousers, his head cocked like a budgie, he looks chipper. Yet he can’t tell the story without drinking. He excoriates the faith healer and declares his love for him. He is transfixed by Grace. The account each gives of their time together – love, quarrels, a still-birth, a healing, a fraud – do not amount to a coherent story.
The triumph of the play is to combine astringent scepticism and supernatural shimmer. Es Devlin’s design brilliantly proclaims this. It provides some of the most exciting pre-show moments of the year. You walk into the auditorium and see a gleaming grey cage. The stage is encased in ramrods of rain, the Irish element, lit by white spotlights. Real wet stuff – you are warned not to slip on it. It falls like translucent spears. You expect to see through it but you can’t. It lifts to reveal a few modest props: ironing board, drinks cabinet, a chair stacked with costumes. Through a glass darkly: this surely is exactly what Friel meant.
Brian Friel died last October, aged 86. His importance was, thank goodness, acknowledged while he was alive; last summer saw the first annual Brian Friel festival. It seems even more pressing because of this production. Faith Healer conjures up a Beckettian sublime. We were, the magician of the title explains, “balanced between the absurd and the momentous”. It moves into forensic dissection. Was it, a woman wonders, “exclusion” that her husband imposed upon her; or was it, rather, “erasion”? It is a 20th-century play that frolics in exuberant, arcane vocabulary, with talk of mountebanks and of chicanery. It is a link between Beckett and Conor McPherson. Between the Irish novel and the Irish play. Which is to say a link between the best of all fiction, drama and philosophising. All delivered with a smile.
