The Faith Healer

I’ve always loved theatre as storytelling (to misquote Mark). Given the connection between person and person that comes only from the stage, it’s surprising that so few shows appeal to that very base need we have to hear stories, but from The Weir to The Testament of Mary to Richard III there’s a strange frisson in the air when actors simply tell stories to each other and let us eavesdrop (two of those three are Irish; this is Irish; I wonder if there's a link, another debate/racial stereotype for another day). Theatre is also, abstractly, a discursive medium; theatremakers who actively deploy the second person are a rare breed, but being willing to subtly break the fourth wall and turn us into confidents is a risk worth taking when the script so implicates the audience. Friel’s script is (as many of his language-loving scripts are) theatre as storytelling. Turner’s production, then, is theatre as the second person. Together...

If Turner does something remarkable in her direction, it’s to require her actors to charge right at us audience. This was not a series of monologues, it was a series of desperate, one-sided conversation pieces, duologues with us as very quiet second characters as this second-person spiel poured out of our protagonists. It was a piece of eye-contact, of questioning, of “I’ll tell you...”, of friendliness – not of the insularity of many monologues. Given that the piece requires the audience to do their homework, take away from the stories what they will and piece together whatever truth there is, it was wonderful to place us, where? On a jury bench? As a friendly ear? A conscience as in a soliloquy? Whatever, it was more than a fly on the wall, and that was Turner’s brilliant shift, to push the personability of the monologues to the fore, slightly force us to lean forwards, and very much force her cast to give their all in a desperate act of needing a connection, despite the isolation of the monologistic script.

And I’d like to agree with Billington, naturally. The play has a mystery about why something amazes us, why a man telling us something is true is inherently believable. Does greater connectivity help with it? Yes, but there’s something about the play itself that I don’t think we’ll ever get to the heart of, something indescribable about it that makes it just work.

Naturally, a wonderful cast. McKee’s broken nature was so beautifully underplayed she made a truly pitiable figure I won’t forget in a hurry (she's always a favourite, and Bake Off's Kate reminds me rather of her). Ron Cook’s one of the finest stage actors, and it’s a part which requires that Shakespearean sensitivity and that Pinter-esque masculinity which he can do like no-one – every time he acts it’s a masterclass, but THIS is a masterclass. And now I’d like to ask, why the earlier criticism of Dillane? Is it simply he hadn’t learnt it all in previews? In its last week he was clear as a bell, laid back as needs must and forgot not one single word. He was a shabby, skeletal, self-deluding fool, something in his eyes telling us he was telling his story to convince himself as much as to convince us. Of all the broken characters, it was the fact that he seemed the least willing to acknowledge his cracks that he felt the most damaged yet the most dangerous of them all. Plus he had the intelligence not to follow through with this...

Two or three years ago, English Touring Theatre staged Translations. It was a very slow production, very languorous and laid-back, lulling you like a lullaby into listening. That sounds like bad, boring theatre, but what James Grieve’s direction did was make Friel’s use of language the star of the show; it was a community built through its language in a play about said language, and to let each line echo literally made its meaning echo in our minds. Friel’s language was the driving force behind pace, character, behind all the world of Ballybeg. Friel’s language being what it is, subtlety and clear-speaking was Grieve’s masterstroke, as it seems Ballybeg is a world of words, and once we’ve found our way in through clarity and precision, what a world Ballybeg is! As with Translations, Faith Healer is about Ballybeg, the power of words and the power of performance. Turner does something very similar to Grieve with her cast – take it slow, take it direct to the audience, make us listen, make us care. And for me, because of that, this is really something, an absolute redemption for the piss-poor Hamlet direction, a wonderful reminder of the talent we recently lost, and straight up there with The Flick and The Encounter as one of the absolute hits of the year.

Brian Friel was a genius.