Hallelujah ...for this miraculous play (even if the faith healer’s a quack)
Faith Healer (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith) Verdict: Music to the ear ★★★★☆ Harry Clarke (Ambassadors Theatre, London) Verdict: Unspeakable ★☆☆☆☆ Red Pitch (Soho Place Theatre, London) Verdict: Funny and touching ★★★★☆
YOU need an ear for the music of language to be seduced by the Irish playwright Brian Friel. If you are in possession of such a lyrical auricle, the latest iteration of his three-person monologue Faith Healer, starring Declan Conlon, Justine Mitchell (Derry Girls) and Nick Holder, is as hypnotic and resonant as any I’ve seen — or heard.
The tale of itinerant showman Frank Hardy, drifting through Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the Sixties and Seventies, is all the better for being cast without big names. It allows the play to sing without reputhough, tations getting in the way. And it allows us to imagine the ‘thick fingers and black nails’ of the men who are Hardy’s nemeses
— as well as the car he remembers as being ‘sluggish under their weight’.
Conlon’s Hardy is an evasive, hollowed-out quack with a messiah complex and guilty conscience, who can’t decide if he’s gifted or a fake. Either way, he’s run out of road and in today’s censorious world is a charismatic predator, fostering the dependency of his wife Grace (Mitchell) and the loyalty of his manager Teddy (Holder).
Everything about Hardy is in need of tidying up — except his peaty voice. The faded glory of his black three-piece suit, the forgotten hair and beard sprouting rogue shoots, are all redolent of a man you’d sling 50p for a pint. And yet Conlon’s disreputable mountebank is also at peace with himself after a lifetime eluding his own judgment.
The persistence of Grace’s bitter faith is remarkable, too. Addressing us as if in an AA meeting, she seeks to account for her love of her husband — despite his boorish neglect and her tragic miscarriages. Mitchell’s Omagh brogue is somewhere between a wobble and a crack, and she drops the odd wistful smile into Grace’s heartstopping confessions.
The show’s biggest surprise, is Holder. He plays the normally mousey Teddy as a Falstaffian circus barker — while also whispering his fears and uncertainties about Hardy and Grace, while draining half a dozen bottles of beer.
Director Rachel O’Riordan has created a buzz about Hammersmith’s Lyric which had, for years, been punching below its weight. And although an arty back wall of peeling paint is slightly at odds with the more Presbyterian setting of wooden table and chairs in Colin Richmond’s design, this is a fine and darkly melodious piece of work.
BEST known from The Morning Show on Apple TV, where he appears opposite Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, Billy Crudup is in the West End with Harry Clarke, a solo show about a nervous young mid-Western gay man, Philip Brugglestein, who becomes possessed by two dodgy English accents.
One is a camp, Little Lord Fauntleroy ‘posh’ voice, adopted to defy his bullying dad.
The other is a Cockney car crash, half-inched from a Guy Ritchie gangster film, for Philip’s promiscuous alter ego ‘Harry Clarke’.
Not since Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins have we had to endure such excruciating dissonance.
But the script, by English-born writer David Cale, is no better as Phil/Harry falls in with a feckless Manhattan rich kid — only to wind up having sex first with the rich kid’s mother, then his sister.
Crudup is about 30 years too old for the role, but it’s the generic and dated accents that really kill you. ‘Oi yam wha’ oi yam’ (translation: ‘I am what I am’) garbles Crudup, sounding as if he’s chewing a kilo of toffee.
Adding caricature to cacophony, he lays on extra gurning to emphasise the mounting stakes in Harry’s misfiring adventures. Even more unbelievably, they’re asking up to £195 for Leigh Silverman’s shoestring production featuring only a B&Q garden table and chair.
IF Crudup wanted to hear how real London youth chat today, he should get to Soho Place theatre.
Here he could tune into a fluent example of multicultural London English in Tyrell Williams’s sharp, funny and very touching play Red Pitch, first seen at the Bush Theatre.
It’s about three 16-year- old black kids growing up playing football in their Walworth ‘ends’ ( home estate) as they cope with change thanks to try-outs at QPR and the ongoing gentrification of their manor. ‘They’re making p’s (£s) out of ends, and if anything they should be putting p’s back into ends,’ says one, in a poetic burst of social criticism.
But the acting dazzles, too. Frances Lovehall oozes pride and pathos as Omz, the kid who looks after his little brother and worries about his 81-yearold grandad. Kedar Williams-Stirling brags improbably as Twix-loving Bilal, while Emeka Sesay as the ambitious and talented goalie, Joey, is the peacekeeper. Aside from a mini-pitch and low red fence, the boys are all the scenery required in Daniel Bailey’s slick production. They’re constantly on the go with keepie-uppies, krumping ( dancing), and very realistic fighting. Swear down, they are all bare sick (very good).