Michael Sheen is to return to the stage in a revival of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. It is the latest in the Old Vic’s series of live-streamed In Camera productions, which take place on its stage with socially distanced actors but no audience in the auditorium.
Sheen will star in the title role, alongside David Threlfall and Indira Varma, in five “scratch” performances of the 1979 play, which consists of four monologues given by three characters: an itinerant faith healer, his wife and his manager. The theatre’s artistic director Matthew Warchus calls it “a shimmering fable of epic dimensions [that] hits you with a huge emotional thwack”. Friel died in 2015 and Faith Healer was staged a year later at the Donmar Warehouse in an admired revival by Lyndsey Turner.
The performances of Faith Healer take place at the Old Vic from 16 to 19 September. Later this week, Andrew Scott will star in an In Camera production of Three Kings, a new play written for him by Stephen Beresford. It has been postponed twice while Scott recovered from a minor operation. The In Camera series was launched in June, with Matt Smith and Claire Foy reuniting to live-stream Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs.
Sheen has had a rich theatre career, including roles as Henry V for the RSC in 1997, Mozart in Amadeus in 1998 and David Frost in the Donmar’s 2007 production of Frost/Nixon, a part he later played on screen. In 2011, he played Hamlet at the Young Vic and starred in the National Theatre of Wales’s production of The Passion on the streets of his home town, Port Talbot. He has had a lockdown TV hit with Staged, playing a version of himself alongside David Tennant, and also appeared this year in a short online drama, Dad, written by Gary Owen.
