Faith Healer – high art with an ambitious script, compelling characterisation and captivating performances (Lyric Theatre until Saturday 14 November)

Brian Friel’s Faith Healer revolves around three people delivering extended monologues. Frank – Francis Hardy – is billed as a fabulous faith healer (“a ministry without responsibility”), but it’s been a long time since his heart was in his performance. His wife Grace has been tagging along as he criss-crosses Wales and Scotland, offering hope to gullible residents who hope that his touch will sooth their pain. Promoter Teddy has been part of the never-ending tour for decades, accompanying the couple through good and (mostly) bad days.

After Frank’s opening remarks, we hear from Grace and quickly realise that these are unreliable narrators. Teddy’s recollections and spin on what are becoming familiar tales further undermines the veracity of their intertwined experiences. And by the time Frank returns for the fourth and final monologue, their present is under the truth-divining microscope as much as their past. Denials are shifty, doubt is cast, and all three repeatedly shy away from confronting painful situations or moments when they learned hard lessons.

Conleth Hill is back on the Lyric Theatre stage. His Frank is sanguine about success and failure, liberally reframing anything within his grasp (he calls Grace his ‘mistress’) and his acclaimed showmanship is more burnished. Unlike the production of Barnum I attended earlier this week, Friel’s faith healer may be familiar with chicanery, but Frank can’t guarantee a spectacle when he walks among the eager punters who turn up at his events.

Lisa Dwyer Hogg is transformed into Grace, a nervy woman whose mood can suddenly shift to animated distress as she remembers being on the road with Frank and the grief that accompanied her pregnancies. Having witnessed Frank’s consumption of liquid courage over the years, she’s now the one knocking back the whiskey. It’s a bravura performance by Hogg as she loosens the threads that Frank wove into the audience’s tapestry.

Originally staged without an interval, Chris McCurry has to resettle the Lyric audience after their 20-minute break with the perspectives of the faith healer’s acolyte. McCurry steps up onto the stage full of comedic energy and wild gesticulations that make him look like Del Boy entering a boxing ring. The audience are tickled by Teddy’s tall tales of hopeless artists he used to promote. McCurry goes for broke as Teddy talks the mundane up into the spectacular before dialling back the emotion as he remembers Grace giving birth in the back of their van. Behind the razzle dazzle, Teddy is also masking his true feelings. Perhaps unwittingly dim, Teddy may be the most honest of the three.

If Friel’s play is brave by relying on audiences being able to parse and analyse such long sequences of monologues, his play is also of its time with a few moments of dated language (‘retarded’).

I can’t help but wonder if Brian Friel had been writing his 1979 play Faith Healer today, might he have been expected to keep the three protagonists on stage, intercutting their dialogue like a fast-moving TV show director with a trigger finger who has consumed too much caffeine in the edit room. The couple and their promoter might almost be correcting and confusing each other’s imperfect recollections in real time. Precise spotlighting would illuminate the current speaker, and the characters might even turn as if to face each other, even though they aren’t in the same room.

    Stripping back theatre to create something that is engaging yet lacking in decoration takes a lot of effort and skill. The monologues may be delivered in isolation, and we only see the actors on stage together in the final curtain call, but director Emma Jordan has carefully crafted each person’s delivery so it’s believable that they all coexisted in real life. The weeks and weeks of rehearsal have paid off to create a show where Grace sounds and feels like she was married to Frank, and Teddy is revealed to be the bouncy tigger that matches up to Frank’s pen portrait of his unexpectedly loyal promoter.

Stuart Marshall’s dark set may look like a raised wooden floor with simple black wings, but there’s a sophistication to the shadowy locations. Paul Keogan directs beams through the stacks of distressed wooden chairs to create patterns on the back wall. Missing beams in the slatted ceiling allow shards of light through to the stage. The soundscape (Garth McConaghie) is relatively spartan, with period music covering the scene changes between monologues, and sound effects adding aural flourishes without distracting. There’s a level of almost invisible control with the actors able to drop their voices on stage yet still be heard across the auditorium.

Faith Healer is high art. The script is ambitious. The characterisation is compelling. The performances are captivating. The atmosphere is a precise piece of engineering.

Friel seems to have been careful not to weigh this work down with a single agenda. Self-imposed exile and the lure of home, the power/illusion of faith, and the rewriting of personal history are lumped in with hints of coercive control and untested attraction. The trio’s references to Frank’s nightly “performances” hints (as Friel opined in interviews) that the faith healer could be a proxy for a more generic artist losing their gift and their inspiration. That reading of the work didn’t jump out at me last night. Instead I was left impressed by the quality of the production, but confused about why it had been chosen out of Friel’s catalogue to be performed in 2026 as part of the theatre’s 75th anniversary programme.

Faith Healer continues at the Lyric Theatre until Saturday 14 November.

Photo credit: Carrie Davenport

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