Faith Healer review: Aidan Gillen and Niamh Cusack shine in Abbey production of Friel masterpiece
Niamh Cusack, Aidan Gillen and Nigel Lindsay enjoy the audience reaction to Faith Healer at the Abbey. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★★☆
Since Joe Dowling first directed Faith Healer at the Abbey Theatre in 1980, the play has gained the status of essential Brian Friel masterpiece – gone from Broadway flop to influential classic of Irish theatre.
Dowling returns to direct now for the Abbey, showing touches as subtle as Sinead McKenna’s lighting, allowing Friel’s words to absorb us, and his players to be storytellers across the play’s four monologues.
Donal McCann’s performance in the role of Frank Hardy has passed into legend, while Ralph Fiennes’s 2006 interpretation has indelible renown in Dublin. Fiennes could not but bring a certain glamour to the part, mixing vanity and cruelty with the artist’s suffering.
Here, Aidan Gillen, hair a little ruffled, suit rumpled, tie undone, foregrounds the effect of Frank’s life of long nights in lonely towns. Hard roads, and harder drinking, have left their mark. So, too, of course, has living with his dubious, unreliable gift, and the pain and loss that the play will ambiguously explore, as Frank’s shabby show leaves Britain’s Celtic fringe for a doomed return to Donegal.
Niamh Cusack as Frank’s wife Grace is the revelation of the piece. Hers is a perfectly judged performance of an unravelling soul, failing in her attempts to keep some semblance of control as she looks back at her ruined life and that fateful night in a Ballybeg pub.
Nigel Lindsay plays Frank’s manager Teddy, a part that’s always liable to steal the show (witness Ian McDiarmid’s Tony-winning take from 2006). That doesn’t quite happen here, but Lindsay’s convivial Cockney adds a fourth-wall-breaking, music hall flavour that disarms before packing an emotional punch.
For Friel, the faith healer is like the playwright – subject to the vagaries of a gift he cannot master. Both practice a craft without apprenticeship, a ministry without responsibility. The play, though, is too rich and strange and specific to be reduced to metaphor. And despite our cultural moment’s intolerance for the myth of the badly behaved male artist – on the night, a woman shouts “liar” from the stalls at one of Frank’s most callous misrememberings – the play retains a universality and freshness while being redolent of its time.
Meanwhile, at the Peacock, the fare is more festive, with a welcome staging of Thornton Wilder’s (★★★★☆, until December 31). The dinner may indeed be long – charting nine decades of the life of a midwestern US industrialist family – but the play is an exercise in concision, coming in at under an hour spent with successive generations as they carve the turkey each year.
Beautifully paced in direction by Sarah Jane Scaife and Raymond Keane, and with an excellent ensemble, this is a perfect seasonal morsel, with a brevity that leaves plenty of time for your own Christmas dinner, or perhaps some city shopping – two things, along with the arts, that could use our support this year.
