Angelus News | April 19-26, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 15

Brian Friel (1929-
2015), perhaps best
known for “Dancing
at Lughnasa,” wrote
prodigiously and
is considered one
of Ireland’s most
prominent contemporary
playwrights.
“Faith Healer”
premiered in 1979
and comprises four
monologues.
“Fantastic” Francis
(Frank) Hardy,
played here by Paul
Norwood with a
potent mix of pathos
and blarney, is an
itinerant Irish healer
who travels about
Scotland and Wales
performing purported
miracles and
knowing that the
hope he imparts is
mostly phony.
Nonetheless, one
time out of 10 or so
he does effect a healing. And in those rare and precious
moments, he can forget the questions that undermine his
life. Do I truly have a gift, he wonders. Or am I a con man?
Do I love the people I heal, or do I hate them (and vice
versa)? Are my powers in decline?
“The kirks [churches] or meetinghouses or schools — all
identical, all derelict,” Frank observes of the towns through
which he and his entourage of two pass. “Maybe in a corner
a withered sheaf of wheat from a harvest thanksgiving
of years ago or a fragment of a Christmas decoration across
a window — relics of abandoned rituals.”
Frank’s long-suffering wife, Grace, speaks from her bedsitter
in London. In a white, satin nightgown and ratty winter
coat, she chain-smokes, swills whiskey, and downs pills
against the pain of some “absolutely horrific” trauma.
Played to perfection by Diana Cignoni (her nationality
changed here from English to German), of the three
characters she seems to have the clearest, most trustworthy
insight into her own psyche and motives.
COURTESY ODYSSEY THEATRE ENSEMBLE VIA FACEBOOK
Though emotionally brutalized by Frank, and wary of his
gift, she recognizes that even half-drunk, “he had a special
… magnificence.” What woman — or man — isn’t a sucker
for magnificence?
Teddy, Frank’s promoter (a spot-on Ron Bottitta), is a
consummate Cockney showbiz hustler who purports to
have one cardinal rule: Keep your business and personal
lives separate. He seems not to know — but then again, he
kind of does — that he has broken the rule completely in
his years of traveling with Frank and Gracie.
Teddy plays dumb but he has his own undermining
questions: Why didn’t the incessantly bickering Frank and
Grace split? Why didn’t he leave them?
All three refer to certain seminal events — for example, a
night at a Methodist church in Wales when Frank cured 10
people at once — but their memories vary wildly,
Was Grace Frank’s wife, or his mistress? Did Frank purposely
bolt when Grace was giving birth or was he absent
because of the death of his mother — or was it his father?
Or did she never give birth at all because, as Frank insists,
she was barren? Was it Frank’s ultimately disastrous idea to
return to his native Ireland, as Grace and Teddy insist, or
Teddy’s, as Frank insists?
They do agree that the return took place at the end of
August, just as harvest time was beginning, that they happened
upon a wedding party at a bar in Ballybeg, and that
there Frank healed a farmer with a bent finger.
Also present that night in some form was a paralytic in
a wheelchair who all three knew in advance that Frank
would be unable to heal. But was the cripple at the wedding
party or holed bitterly up at home, dead or alive, a
figment of their collective imagination or a broken Christ
figure, calling Frank through the cathedral arch to his
death — or was it new life?
Frank’s epilogue doesn’t so much tie up the loose ends
as lead us deeper into mystery. Is “Faith Healer” a play
about childhood wounds, the hero’s journey, the magic
of theater, unrequited love, the fragility of memory, the
impossibility for an artist of marriage, the death of religious
faith, the anguished hope that we are not ourselves 100
percent phony, the fact that every human relationship is at
best a tangled knot?
All that and more. As Teddy says of Gracie that night in
Ballybeg: “And suddenly she is this terrific woman that of
course I love very much, married to this man I love very
much — love maybe even more. But that’s all. Nothing
more. That’s all. And that’s enough.”
Heather King is a blogger, speaker and the author of several books.
April 19-26, 2019 • ANGELUS • 33