Left – Colin Friels. Photo – Brett BoardmanFrom the acclaimed and recently departed Irish playwright Brian Friel comes this engrossing play starring three of our stage’s finest actors. Not a straightforward drama by any means, it relates the tale of the tumultuous lives of Frank, a mercurial and alcoholic Irish faith healer, his long-suffering and oft-denied wife Grace, and Teddy, their almost vaudevillian Cockney theatrical agent. The three work together as a dysfunctional team to peddle their travelling sideshow act, chiefly around Scotland, bringing hope or confirmation of hopelessness to the lame, the blind, and the disfigured or, just occasionally, an apparently real cure. By Frank’s own admission, on the occasions that the faith healing seemingly works, he doesn’t know if it is somehow a kind of psychosomatic reaction or placebo effect, or if he really has supernatural abilities… however inconsistent.
The play does not provide definitive answers, as it is not strictly concerned with maintaining believable naturalism. This applies on a formal level as well, as the show is structured not as a traditional stage play in which the characters interact, but in a series of monologues, almost like an epistolary novel. First Frank speaks, then Grace, followed by Teddy, and finally returning to Frank, each taking the stage in turn for a lengthy solo speech. To whom are these orations being delivered? In the absence of any clear diegetic indication, one can only presume that those being addressed are, quite simply, us – the audience of the play.
By the same token it is not initially clear whether these three characters are speaking from the same point in the narrative timeline, a process complicated further by the extremely meandering and digressive nature of the monologues. Their anecdotes and recollections jump all around the chronology which they are, in a piecemeal fashion, gradually conveying to us about their shared stories. Shared, overlapping, yet by no means identical. Rashomon-like, we are hearing iterative retellings of many of the same events from vastly different perspectives, with each character painting a very different picture both of each other and the experiences they have shared. However, it is not a simple case of alternative versions of the same sequence of events, as each speaker’s telling is awash with personalised details, information the others may not have been party to, extensive digressions and, especially, the aforementioned lack of narrative chronology as they become distracted and their stories bounce back and forth around the timeline.
At certain points though, it may seem rather like an exercise in theatrical circumlocution, and if your attention is wont to wander you may find that seemingly innocuous details may prove to be more significant than they appeared when nestled amid the abundance of amusing recollections and bitter reminiscences. Both a fascinating triple character study and an evocative conjuration of some very gloomy British backwaters of the last century, the play is by no means light entertainment, nor is it easy-going. In many respects it is a type of puzzle, in which an audience approaching the material without foreknowledge must pay rapt attention to its many details and constantly sift through them on the fly, as the relevant information falls into place amongst the plethora of character beats, misery and occasional humour. Whether what it all adds up to feels like a satisfying narrative will be for each individual to decide, as whether the effort of piecing it all together was rewarding may depend very much on whether or not the many detours along the journey were found to be intrinsically interesting.
Almost regardless of whether one feels that the play’s unconventional storytelling ultimately paid off or not, fortunately the acting in this production is riveting, and of the highest calibre, directed with assuredly restrained simplicity by Judy Davis. We open with Colin Friels, one of our great stage and screen actors, who is excellent as Frank the titular faith healer. He is a man awash with drink, self-delusion, and loathing, yet on a peculiar spiritual quest of his own, despite it all. Friels also has the advantage of being the only actor to perform two bookending monologues. This gives us the opportunity to form first impressions about his character when initially exposed only to his own self-portrayal, but by returning to us at the end we are able to view him in a new light. Our perceptions of Frank are now indelibly coloured by what his wife and manager have had to say about him in the interim, and this gives Friels even stronger material to play against.
Alison Whyte is heartbreakingly good as his complex wife Grace, fierce, smart and tough yet downtrodden, hopeless and abused, with a rich backstory of her own that fleshes out their codependent nightmare of a marriage. Although Frank’s reminiscences contain a fair share of misery, Whyte has a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting in her truly dispiriting tales of woe, although she does get to show many colours in her performance before crumpling into a despairing heap. Pip Miller possibly steals the show as Teddy, if for no other reason than that this character and his yarns are predominantly quite funny, at least at first. A showman to the core, his Cockney banter is beguiling and his anecdotes at times uproarious, but Miller too gets to play different shades, as his story inevitably shifts from the (by that point much-welcome) comic relief to his own recounting of some of the horrible events of this ultimately miserable saga.
Faith Healer is not a show for the faint of heart nor the short of attention, but it is a rewarding experience for those willing to allow the winding, overlapping threads of theatrical storytelling to encircle them and eventually weave their narrative fabric. Most of all, it is a superb showcase for some truly excellent, exalting and devastating acting from three seasoned performers at the top of their craft.
Belvoir presents
Faith Healer
by Brian Friel
Director Judy Davis
Venue: Upstairs Theatre | Belvoir St, Surry Hills NSW
Dates: 22 October – 27 November 2016
Bookings: belvoir.com.au
