Faith Healer

by Brian Friel

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 18 September 2020

Matthew Warchus directed Michael Sheen as Frank Hardy the eponymous faith healer, Indira Varma as his wife Grace and David Threlfall as his manager Teddy in Brian Friel's powerful play, presented in the Old Vic's 'In Camera' series of filmed live performances for which one can buy a ticket for viewing from one's own home. The theatre itself is devoid of an audience, and only the actors and a skeleton technical staff are in the building during a performance.

The play is ideally suited to the constraints imposed by the government's regulations in response to the current pandemic. It consists of four monologues, by Frank, Grace, Teddy and then Frank again, in which only one actor at a time need be onstage. The three characters speak of fateful trips to a village in Sunderland and to another in County Donegal, presenting the audience with a series of conundrums as it becomes clear that each of them remembers events that cannot all be true, since they are contradictory. That all three are speaking of the same events is clear from the repetition of whole phrases of description, mainly to do with geographic positioning, but their recollections of event and motivation complicate the picture in a way which a more conventional dramatic presentation would be hard pressed to emulate. Is this just the inevitable unreliability of memories of trauma, or is there deliberate or prudential falsification? The playwright gives no real clue, leaving us to draw our own conclusions and to construct our own sense of what may have happened. 

I last saw and reviewed the play at the Donmar in August 2016; it was fascinating to see it again with a different cast and essentially through a different medium. Michael Sheen's Frank was an impassioned man possibly using his old habit of chanting Welsh and Scottish village names to calm his nerves before an engagement to mask a more profound anguish than he can face up to even while trying to confide in us. Neither Indira Varma's fragile Grace nor David Threlfall's drink-sodden Teddy can be free of their own pain, so their recollections too conceal matters on which we are invited to speculate. With all the circumstantial detail of the monologues, there remains an enigma at the heart of the play.

Perhaps the raw power of the play was slightly dulled by the means of transmission: I cannot help feeling that it would have been more overwhelming if one was actually in the auditorium sharing the communal theatrical experience. Nonetheless, in the skilled hands of this formidable cast, it was a great addition to the 'In Camera' season.

Aristocrats

by Brian Friel

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 30 August 2018

Lyndsey Turner directs this revival of Brian Friel's 1979 play about the decaying O'Donnell family, unusually Roman Catholic denizens of a 'Big House' in Ballybeg, County Donegal (most 'Big Houses' belonged to Anglo Protestants).

The house has seen better times - repairs are outstanding and there is virtually no money to keep it going - and the family in the 1970s is not what it was either, having descended from Chief Justice to sausage factory worker in four generations. The senescent father (James Laurenson), principally present to us through his rambling diatribes overheard through a baby monitor, still holds sway over Judith (Eileen Walsh), the daughter dutifully caring for him, and can still strike terror into is wayward son Casimir (David Dawson) when he is visiting from Hamburg, but he seems to have less effect on Alice (Elaine Cassidy) visiting with her husband Eamon (Emmet Kirwan) from London, and the youngest daughter Claire (Aisling Loftus) still living at home but about to be married.

The family has in fact gathered for Claire's wedding, but Tom Hoffnung (Paul Higgins), an American academic, is also ferreting around the house and taking notes about family anecdotes as part of a research project. The situation is thus ripe both for peculiar revelations and for some sociological theorising and analysis, and at times both seem a little forced. However, it is not so much that there are skeletons in the closet (as might be expected from the dramatic set-up), but rather that the siblings - apart perhaps from the determinedly practical Judith - are deeply strange people: Alice losing herself to drink because her marriage has soured, Claire veering between the highs and lows of manic depression, and Casimir holding himself together with inexhaustible nervous energy. When Eamon remarks to Tom that the family half believe that Casimir's German wife and three boys are a figment of his imagination we are left forever unsure of how to take anything that Casimir says, and his palpable shock when Tom presents him with incontrovertible evidence that one of his family memories is impossible only strengthens the impression that he is lost in daydreams.

Though there are weirdly comic moments, much of what we see instils an atmosphere of debility and even despair; the similarity to Chekhovian ennui is increasingly obvious, reinforced by the country house setting, the faded gentility of the family, and the eventual collapse of the means to keep the whole enterprise going. But the style of this particular production makes it hard to grasp the tone of the piece, with the result that it takes more time than it should to settle into the world we are witnessing. Rather than creating a realistic setting, Turner and designer Es Devlin have designed an almost featureless pale pastel green acting space with a model of a house standing in for the real thing, and stage directions at the beginning of each act read out to set the scene. Where such a model was a powerful symbol in The Inheritance here it looks a little contrived, and the constant presence of the cast hovering in the background when not required to be on stage, so masterfully effective in Matthew Lopez's play, here makes the action more difficult to follow.

This is a pity, because the individual performances are often very good, and David Dawson in particular is brilliant as Casimir; and the concluding mixture of melancholy and hope is quietly affecting.

Faith Healer

by Brian Friel

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 1 August 2016

Directed by Lyndsey Turner and designed by Es Devlin, this production features Stephen Dillane as Frank, the faith healer, Gina McKee as his partner Grace and Ron Cook as Teddy his manager.

The play consists of four monologues given by Frank, Grace, Freddy then Frank again, each actor alone on the stage in a different setting, each recounting directly to the audience some episodes from Frank's itinerant journeys around Wales, Scotland and Ireland as a faith healer who occasionally (but not often) effects cures.

It is an extraordinary theatrical device, removing the usual situation in which characters on stage can interact with one another, and instead relying on extended reminiscence to reveal both character and narrative. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the accounts of the three speakers differ so markedly in some details that it is impossible to know exactly what happened; or rather, it becomes necessary for the audience to include these contradictions in its assessment of the characters and their experiences. Although the general shape of the 'story' seems relatively clear, the different accounts of it are impossible to reconcile with absolute finality.