Faith Healer review – Brian Friel revival tests its audience’s belief
This is how it always goes for Frank Hardy, the faith healer of Brian Friel’s 1979 play Faith Healer. An audience has gathered in a room like this one, above a pub, and waits to be spellbound by his performance. He recalls his travels through remote Welsh and Scottish villages with his wife, Grace, and manager, Teddy. For some, he seemingly, miraculously, cures their ailments. For others, it is, indeed, just a performance. Chicanery, as his father-in-law calls it.
The beguiling trick of Friel’s play is this ambiguity. Here, though, Colin Connor’s performance makes Hardy’s shame too emphatic. In an oversized suit that sags like the “tatty banner” bearing his name, he shuffles so restlessly it’s as if he’s trying to shake himself out of his own body. Even the glare of the light seems cruel and exposing. Self-loathing is manifest; what is not is a strong suggestion that he might be capable of the inexplicable.
Director David Thacker cleverly places Vicky Binns’s Grace and Rupert Hill’s Teddy in the audience, so the two characters are also watching his act and trying to decipher it. When it’s their turn to soliloquise, their accounts conflict. All three characters falter, prevaricating to avoid painful truths about the death of a baby and Hardy’s final, fateful homecoming.
Binns gives a physical, if over-heightened, dimension to Grace’s claim of being “obliterated” by his falsehoods. She shakes and rattles, each wincing convulsion suggesting his poison running through her – as if her “blood disorder” is of his making. Most well balanced is Rupert Hill’s transfixing, quieter performance as the manager, suggesting a man dumbfounded by Hardy’s acts of wonder and self-interest.
The rhythm of Thacker’s production is a little too steady, so Friel’s rambling, dense monologues sometimes become slabs of speech. But as the cast roll story after story at us, scanning the audience’s eyes, it becomes clear what they’re searching for: our faith.
• Faith Healer is at the King’s Arms, Salford, until 19 January
