Faith Healer

Brian Friel’s Faith Healer is usually classified as a drama, but I’m not convinced. Call me old-fashioned, but I think of drama as involving conflict, harking back to the Greeks and the idea of agon. At the very least, I look for a couple of dramatis personae having at it. But Faith Healer, which was first seen on Broadway in a short-lived 1979 production starring James Mason, is composed of four monologues seemingly adressed to the audience. The first and last of these are delivered by supposed faith healer Frank Hardy (Ralph Fiennes), the second and third by, respectively, Frank’s mistress/wife Grace (Cherry Jones) and his manager Teddy (Ian McDiarmid).

These characters are looking back at a period in the 1930s and 1940s when they traversed Wales and Ireland for a series of one-night stands where Frank was ballyhooed as a faith healer. At one poorly attended session, all 10 hopefuls on hand were cured of whatever ailed them — whether by Frank or auto-suggestion remains uncertain. Part of Friel’s no-surprise point is that when three people recall specific events, they’re likely to remember them differently. As a running gag has it, they can’t even agree on which of them made Fred Astaire’s recording of “The Way You Look Tonight” a permanent feature of Frank’s sometimes successful but more frequently failed appearances.

Director Jonathan Kent and McDiarmid first worked together on this play, in the same capacities, during their tenure as co-artistic heads of London’s Almeida Theatre. I saw that 2001 production and, if my memory serves me reliably, the intimacy of the Almeida’s temporary King’s Cross stage suited the piece well. Still, for this treatment, Kent uses the stage of the Booth Theatre imaginatively. The set, consisting of only a few easily removed chairs, tables, lamps and rugs, plus a movable curtain, is by Jonathan Fensom; so are the period costumes.

McDiarmid has once again transformed himself into a mincing Cockney; his Teddy couldn’t be farther away from his most famous role, that of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine in the Star Wars films. Teddy evinces a loyalty to Frank that extends beyond a professional interest, even though he repeats that professional interest is all a manager should offer. Shuffling over to a cabinet for a beer or two, McDiarmid is a muted laff riot, offering a superbly Dickensian characterization.

Surprisingly, Jones and Fiennes get the less showy assignments. Seated throughout her long speech, Jones as Grace announces immediately that she is “getting stronger” and “becoming more controlled,” a tip-off that she isn’t getting stronger or becoming more controlled. The actress must be scrupulous about conveying Grace’s emotional weakness as she recounts, among other travails, the birth of her stillborn child. Jones does what’s needed skillfully, except that her English accent doesn’t pass muster.

Grace says that Frank isn’t particularly handsome, which is an odd thing to hear in this production. Average looks are something that Ralph Fiennes can’t project. His Frank is very handsome, and also self-mockingly tormented. And that voice! Who wouldn’t be healed by someone with this man’s supple vocal quality?

When all is said and done, Jones’s monologue comes across like a patient’s outpouring to a silent psychoanalyst; McDiarmid’s turn sounds like the nattering of an unwelcome person who has sat down next to you on a park bench; and Fiennes’s maundering has the resonance of a panhandler’s sob story. I can’t help thinking that Friel might have gotten much farther if he’d had these three dispense their doleful Irish blarney in dialogue that contains actual conflict. Theatergoers in search of a gripping drama about what constitutes genuine healing and abiding faith in an increasingly faithless world won’t find it here, but those who want to see three actors showing their considerable mettle will have come to the right place.