THEATRE REVIEW: Faith Healer - The New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-u-Lyme.

The 'fantastic' Francis Hardy is a faith healer, touring village halls in the more remote and superstitious regions of Wales, Scotland and his native Ireland. He is ambivalent about his 'gift' and has taken to drink in order to quell his doubts, but his success rate is evidently impressive enough to reassure him that he's 'got something.'  He is accompanied by his wife Gracie, a Yorkshirewoman ('from Scarborough - or is it Knaresborough? They all sound the same') and Teddy, a cockney 'promoter' with a history of managing 'freak acts' whose devotion to the couple hints at some primal need in him. The central event in their past has been the birth and subsequent death of the Hardy's child, while on the road, an event which has had more obvious significance to Gracie and Teddy than to the errant Francis, whose failed attempt to 'cure' a cripple has repercussions for all three ....

Brian Friel’s 1979 play is an original and absorbing work, less a play than a sequence of monologues in which three related characters relate the story. The relationship between the trio is at the core of the work: ideally an audience should become increasingly absorbed in their predicament as the evening unfolds. It’s an actors’ piece and any director approaching it would be wise to confine their efforts to helping the actors develop their characters as truthfully as possible without imposing their own grand design or ‘concept’.  

Director Michael Cabot did this in this production for his own London Classic Theatre Company, employing a spare simple set (by Bek Palmer)  that looks like an improvised map approximating the various locations the remembered events took place in. One appropriate innovation was to have both Gracie and Teddy on stage as reacting presences during Francis' opening monologue, thus establishing them as characters rather than merely 'names' referred to. As Francis, Paul Carroll (looking alarmingly like an early middle-aged George Bernard Shaw) was at home with the poetry of the role (the names of the villages are recited, like an incantation) and had made the necessary emotional connection with the character to make the opening monologue compelling. But in an in-the-round space like this one, audibility can be tricky, particularly in an intimate piece, and there were times when words and phrases - sometimes important ones - were missed. The same, but more so, applied to Gina Costigan as Gracie, tasked with the evening's most harrowing monologue (this is from the perspective of someone seated in D100; after the interval, I moved to the front row, where audibility was much clearer). In the play's most grateful role, of Teddy, Jonathan Ashley immediately struck up rapport with the audience after the rather oblique/bleak first Act and his monologue was both engaging and absorbing, but tinged with the right degree of melancholy as he reflected on how his association with the Hardys came to an end.  

This is promising production of a modern classic which should gain in power and (hopefully) volume as it makes it progress through Britain and Ireland during the autumn.

Reviewer - Paul Ashcroft
on - 5.9.23