Dramatic gold wrought from conversational loose change
Faith Healer Donmar Warehouse ★★★★★
Frank, Grace, Teddy: an itinerant Irish “faith healer”, his wife and the cockney old-time manager who attended them both, for years, on Frank’s hitand-miss mission to heal the sick in out of the way, forlorn little towns across pre and post-war Wales and Scotland.
A simple trinity of characters, and an old-fashioned proposition – we hear them talk to us in turn and at length. One monologue after another. And yet what an exceptional, spellbinding night at the theatre the late Irish playwright Brian Friel bequeathed us with his 1979 masterpiece, its longevity re-confirmed by this flawless Donmar revival.
New York’s response to Faith Healer at its short-lived premiere was one of indifference, despite the fact that it starred James Mason as Frank Hardy; legend has it that one audiencemember answered an apologetic curtain-call address by Mason with the words: “It’s not your failure, it’s our failure.”
With this densely detailed series of confessionals, it’s undoubtedly the case that you need to concentrate, keep hold of piles of conversational loose change and wait, patiently, as they’re accrued into a pot of dramatic gold.
Performed in a portentous fashion, and the enigmatic evening has the potential to be purgatorial; as delivered in Lyndsey Turner’s beautifully measured and nuanced production, though, Friel’s lyrically written chamber-piece delivers shivers of quasi-spiritual ecstasy.
As if to point up the transfiguring magic of his art – the way he interweaves ideas about religion and showmanship, our collective credulity and poignant frailty – this version delivers a coup
de théâtre before we’ve even sat down: designer Es Devlin enveloping the acting area in a cascade of illuminated water, part shimmering stage-curtain, part cheerless downpour. Stephen Dillane is the first to stand revealed, starring as Frank Hardy – dignity and mystery personified as he loiters on an island of bare-boards, in dark jacket, trousers, coat and cap – with distinguished greying hair and beard.
Calm, watchful, as conversational as a fella in a bar, yet otherworldly too, through the incantation of rural place-names, and the revisiting of key moments, old haunts, he leads us step by step to the Irish homecoming and request for healing that was his undoing (and yet a willed act of self-sacrifice).
Dillane’s dryness, wit and unsettling directness of gaze is matched for richly inhabited detail by his two fellow performers. Barefoot in a bedsit, Gina McKee, springing the surprise of an Irish accent on us when we’d been led by Frank to believe Grace was a Yorkshire-woman (one of many slippery components of their contested backstory) is cool, collected, mesmerising. Yet she brims with sadness: in grief at a stillborn child and the desolation of being left behind.
Relieving the gloom of their history of childlessness, poverty and squabbling, Ron Cook is a joy to watch as the long-suffering help-meet Teddy, regaling us with tales of a bloodyminded whippet like a music-hall turn but knocking back the beer as if to purge himself of pain.
Friel, who died last October, would, I’m sure, be raising a glass in thanks to them all. This is truly something special.
Until Aug 20. Tickets: donmarwarehouse.com