FAITH HEALER ★★★★★
Lyric Hammersmith until April 13 Tickets: 020 8741 6850
Brian Friel’s 1979 play consists of three characters and four monologues each telling a slightly different version of the final tour of ‘Francis Hardy - Faith Healer’ before tragedy sunders their relationship.
Frank (Declan Conlon) is the titular Healer, an Irish mountebank with a gift for words and, it seems, the occasional miracle.
His partner Grace (Derry Girl Justine Mitchell) tags along, struggling in the belief he is the genuine article.
Cockney manager Teddy (Nick Holder) keeps the bandwagon rolling through a combination of music hall hucksterism and a deep-rooted affection for both.
Director Rachel O’Riordan’s production is simply staged with just a handful of chairs, a large poster and a cracked and peeling wall. This allows the trio of superb actors to relate events in Friel’s shimmering, incantatory language on their journey in an old van through the village halls of Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
All the action is in the words, though Grace’s wounded postures – and the way she turns her back on us to drink whisky from a teacup – combined with Teddy’s serial beer drinking deliver powerful portraits of loneliness, shame, grief and loss.
Unadulterated by theatrical effects, it slips from moments of wonder, when Frank manages to perform a ‘miracle’, to the anguish of a stillborn child and finally to terror when he confronts his ultimate fate.
Friel’s genius is in the way he stitches together the reality of austere lives, the rush of joy in a close-knit community and the searing burn of tragedy in stories that have been doctored by the tellers to accommodate their desires and delusions while attempting to salvage hope from despair. O’Riordan captures perfectly the mystical ambivalence at the heart of a play that interrogates the nature of faith, selfdeception and love.
A spellbinding production of a drop dead masterpiece.