If you were very lucky when
you were very young, your grandmother may have put you to bed,
and as she tucked you in and pulled the covers round your chin,
she may have continued telling you a story she’d started the
night before. No matter that it was summer and the night not
completely dark, you could hardly wait to climb into bed and
hear her story.
That same sense of
anticipation fills you as you sit in the darkened Booth Theatre
and hear the incantation of Welsh place names which start three
of the four monologues which comprise Brian Friel’s
Faith Healer. With
a gentle swoosh of the stage curtain, not unlike a bucket of
water tossed across a floor, we shift from Frank’s perspective
on his life as an itinerant mountebank to his wife Grace’s
remembrances of their marriage, and ultimately to Frank’s
manager, the indefatigable Teddy, who attempts to recount the
events leading to the night in question. On a coal-dark stage,
with soot-blackened walls, and with a pitch-black fireplace
emanating little or no warmth, the three characters take their
turns, one after another, and reveal their version of the life
which has brought them to this place.
As Frank Hardy, Ralph Fiennes
reveals the inner torment of all artists who search for
validation in their work, never certain, always questioning,
while attempting to allay doubt. Charismatic, at times, and
ruthlessly charming, Frank burns with the need to rise above his
father’s station, and to merit the faith placed in him – not
only by those who seek him in the seedy halls of rural Wales,
but also by Teddy, and particularly Grace.
To hear Cherry Jones as Grace
is to perhaps feel a slight disconnect as her Yorkshire accent
wobbles with her emotional state – and yet there’s no question
that Ms. Jones is fully inhabiting the pain which marks Grace’s
life with Frank. Defying her father, and uncompromisingly loyal
to Frank, Grace is a soul trapped between two abusers, men who
see her only as a reflection of themselves.
And meanwhile, Teddy,
beautifully played by Ian McDiarmid, watches in mesmeric
disbelief. Never before in all his years of managing truculent
and temperamental stage acts has he encountered such a strange
and hypnotically dysfunctional pair on a seemingly irreversible
course of self-destruction. Knowing he should have waved
goodbye long ago, he cannot bear to let them go on without him,
doomed as they are, and him an almost-accomplice.
Follow along, we all do,
behind the falsely-soothing rush of Welsh place names as the
characters make their way through Scotland and Wales, and
ultimately, back to Ireland, from whence they have come and for
so long been running. For there’s no denying the darkness. You
can’t go home again when it never was home, not the one you
needed it to be. And when the end comes, as almost surely you
knew it would, and when you realize you knew all along,
nonetheless, you can’t help but wish— You wish to hear more.
Best always,
Mark and Robert
