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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.
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