Review

02/09/06 Faith Healer

Gate Theatre, Dublin

by BRUCE ARNOLD

THE realisation of Brian Friel's greatest play, 'Faith Healer', at the Gate Theatre, is little short of magical in every respect.

The play consists of three monologues, the main character's being split into two, at the beginning and end. Each tells a different version of the single, tragic story, the play being in part about truth and lies, and in part about chance and death.

The mercurial playing of Ralph Fiennes is the outer frame for this.

His portrait of Frank Hardy, the healer and the psychopath, is potent, subtle, elusive. He is a weaver of dreams and, occasionally, of miracles. He is loved to distraction by his woman, followed to the ends of their small world by his manager, and then dispatched, more or less by his own hand. Fiennes is stunning, but the magic goes much further.

Fiennes is equalled by the outstanding playing of Ingrid Craigie, as Grace Hardy, and by Ian MacDiarmid as Teddy.

Grace is Friel at his finest, a wonderful portrait of a woman in love with an impossible man. It is a lament for him. The terrible event of the drama is already over when she appears, as the story's second teller.

Frank has filled her life and still fills it, and she gives the sweetest possible testament to his fickleness; if this is a judgment, it is made rich and whole by her love.

As to Teddy, he is a classic figure out of English theatre, with something owed to music hall, to the set-up drama, to the impossibility of bringing action and living theatre to dreary halls in small towns.

He has given up everything for the sake of Frank Hardy, forgives him what is not really forgivable.

His, too, is a lament, a poignant memory among the strange scraps of theatre which have made up his life.

MacDiarmuid is quite magnificent. Director Jonathan Kent has achieved marvellous balance and a strong, cold pace.

This fits the gaunt setting, the atmosphere of doubt, and the eventual cruelty that makes the play so compelling.

02/08/06 from Variety

Faith Healer

(Gate Theater, Dublin; 371 seats; $37 top)

A Gate Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Brian Friel. Directed by Jonathan Kent.

Frank Hardy - Ralph Fiennes
Grace Hardy - Ingrid Craigie
Teddy - Ian McDiarmid

By KAREN FRICKER

Twenty-seven years after its unsuccessful world premiere at Broadway's Longacre Theater, Brian Friel's powerful monologue play "Faith Healer" may finally be ready for its Gotham closeup. The combination of top-line talent; a masterful production from Jonathan Kent that embraces and exploits the play's unusual structure; and auds now more familiar with postmodern storytelling forms portend a positive New York reaction. The only significant problem in this initial Dublin outing -- a weak distaff lead -- seems likely to be immaterial given that Cherry Jones will take over from Ingrid Craigie when the production opens May 4 at the Booth.
Let us cast no illusions, however, that this is an easy crowd-pleaser, nor that it will reward auds drawn only by the star power of leading man Ralph Fiennes. The actors never appear onstage together, and Fiennes' opening and closing monologues clock up to only about 40 minutes of the total 2¼ hours' playing time.

The power of play and production lie in the interplay between the three characters' often contradictory accounts of the same events. The action takes place in the imagination of auds as we sift through clues and try to understand what's happened -- and what Friel's larger message may be. If there is a star turn here, it is from veteran U.K. thesp Ian McDiarmid (best known as Emperor Palpatine in the "Star Wars" films), who lights up the stage as the tragicomic Cockney manager Teddy.

Fiennes plays the titular character, Frank Hardy, who makes a marginal living traveling between seedy town halls in Scotland and Wales healing the sick and lame by the laying-on of hands. It is only when this works -- and it seldom does -- that Frank feels happiness, "because the questions that undermined my life then became meaningless."

He is accompanied by his wife, Grace (Craigie), and by Teddy, who stand by him loyally, despite Frank's narcissism and refusal to acknowledge his true relationship with Grace in public. (She shares his last name, but he says she's his mistress -- one of the many narrative discrepancies by which Friel warns auds not to take anything we hear at face value.)

Frank is the archetypical figure of the self-doubting, charismatic artist who needs the attention of others but cannot escape his own self-absorption. Fiennes' characteristic intensity and his beautiful speaking voice (here passing off a solid Irish accent) suit him brilliantly for the role, and he is never short of hypnotic onstage, exploiting Friel's conversational dialogue to draw auds in. One wishes, though, for a few more of the rare moments where Frank's passions flare, revealing the rage that fuels the character. A bit more heat is called for from Fiennes to make sense of the power Frank holds over others.

Kent's set changes help advance the theme of cheap but effective magic: a curtain whisks horizontally across the bare stage, and in an impossibly short period of time, Craigie appears in her own sitting-room set. She is saddled with the play's biggest challenge, in that we meet Grace at a time of extreme distress in which she can do nothing but remember the past that tortures her. Through her monologue we start to realize that Friel is playing tricks with time that become fully clear only in the play's final minutes.

Two locations become the focal point of all three characters' narratives: Kinlochbervie, "as far north as you can go in Scotland," where Frank and Grace's child was born (or was it?); and Ballybeg, Friel's archetypical Irish town, where Frank plies his trade for the last time. The characters skirt nervously around the contours of these stories, alerting us to the emotional devastation they contain. Craigie is verbally impressive, but compared to Fiennes' and McDiarmid's total embodiment of their characters, her performance seems stuck in her head.

The tone shifts completely when McDiarmid appears onstage, done up in seedy splendor of scarlet smoking jacket and bow tie. McDiarmid is in total control of the role he played once before, in Kent's 2001 production at London's Almeida Theater. Taking advantage of the character's consistent direct address, he plays Teddy like a vaudeville comedian, and the audience hangs on everything he says. His story is intriguing indeed, for, having laid down his professional law -- relations with clients should be "strictly business only" -- he reveals how he broke all his own rules in his devotion to Frank and Grace.

Fiennes' second appearance, as he finally narrates what happened in Ballybeg, creates an otherwordly power. As he walks slowly toward the audience, all the elements of the story come together and we realize that this moment could be happening only in the space of the theater. The play's paradoxical identity as a tragic celebration of the artist's craft comes into focus in a moment that is uplifting and shattering at the same time.

Thanks to Eva on the forum for gathering all the following reviews:

NEW YORK TIMES
Ralph Fiennes, Portraying the Gaunt Genius in 'Faith Healer'

By BEN BRANTLEY

HE is certainly in love with himself, isn't he, this middle-aged rake with the time-shined suit and the gaunt, unshaven face. Or is it that he holds himself in even more contempt than he does the rest of the world? Either way, the narcissism is overwhelming. And despite yourself, you can't take your eyes off him, because the power behind the pose is so genuine that it hurts.

Playing the title role in Brian Friel's great play "Faith Healer," which opened last night in a mesmerizing revival at the Booth Theater, Ralph Fiennes paints a portrait of the artist as dreamer and destroyer that feels both as old as folklore and so fresh that it might be painted in wet blood. The self-lacerating vanity that has always been central to Mr. Fiennes's presence as a film actor ("The Constant Gardener," "The English Patient") has rarely been to put to such powerful use.

This shrewd channeling of his glamorously peevish star shine may finally get "Faith Healer," a production from the Gate Theater of Dublin, directed with poetic starkness by Jonathan Kent, the New York audience it deserves. First (and last) seen on Broadway in 1979 for a mere 20 performances with James Mason as its star, "Faith Healer" is a dense and lyrical series of monologues, a form little loved by action-hungry American theatergoers.

Yet anyone who starts listening, with full attention, to the words — and, just as important, the silences — of the three characters who tell their horrible, fantastic and oddly familiar story should be fatally hooked. Intricate and self-contradicting, the narrative has the addictive pull of a detective yarn, a cosmic version in which the clues do and do not add up to a clear solution. And in Mr. Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid this production has storytellers who know how to hold a stage unconditionally, even when, in Ms. Jones's case, the performer doesn't entirely match the part.

"Faith Healer" is the unforgiving and exalting tale of Frank Hardy (Mr. Fiennes) and his wife, Grace (Ms. Jones), and manager, Teddy (Mr. McDiarmid). Frank is an itinerant, erratic healer of the sick in small towns throughout the British Isles, who can be reduced in description to boilerplate clichés about impossible artistic geniuses.

An Irishman in self-imposed exile, Frank is an egocentric, hard-drinking, irresistible man who is so suspicious of his talent and so afraid of losing it that he makes everyone around him suffer. You've heard all this before, no doubt, in books, films and plays about artists like Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and Diane Arbus, brilliant souls crucified on their own talent.

The astonishment of "Faith Healer" lies in how Mr. Friel particularizes this archetype, with the wealth of scenic and eccentric detail to be expected from an author whose other works include "Dancing at Lughnasa," without losing its mythic resonance. The play is a mystery story in both the mundane and spiritual senses. Though each of the narrators tells essentially the same tale in four soliloquies (Frank speaks first and last), their accounts disagree in ways that leave us dizzy.

As is often the case in Mr. Friel's plays, memory is capricious, just as Frank's great and improbable gift is. You'll have no trouble getting the gist of the experiences shared by Frank, Grace and Teddy: of their travels to rural outposts in an increasingly temperamental old van; of the combustible relationship between Frank and Grace; of the night in a Welsh village when a drunken Frank healed all 10 invalids who came to him; of the final, disastrous return to Frank's native Ireland.

But beyond that you don't know what version of reality to accept. Was Grace Frank's wife (as she and Teddy say) or his mistress (as Frank insists)? Was it Frank and Grace or Teddy who demanded that a Fred Astaire recording of "The Way You Look Tonight" be played so incongruously during Frank's healing sessions? Was it Frank's mother or father who died while he was on the road?

Mr. Friel leaves the answers in shadow. But the pain that emerges from these conflicting accounts is as hard and lucid as crystal. You come to realize that the distortions and lies — if that's what they are — are an anesthetic that allows these people to tell their stories, as is often the case with personal myths. But as Mr. Fiennes, Ms. Jones and Mr. McDiarmid demonstrate so powerfully, such evasions can keep anger, closely followed by anguish, at bay only for so long.

I'll admit I was a reluctant conquest of this production and particularly of Mr. Fiennes, to whom looking romantic and tortured has always, it seemed to me, come too easily. I had seen a production of "Faith Healer" in New Haven in 1994, directed by Joe Dowling and starring the incomparable Donal McCann, that remains one of the transcendent experiences of my theatergoing life. Mr. Dowling's production was pitched almost at a whisper, letting the play reveal its darkening depths by stealth.

The interpretation by Mr. Kent, who is best known for ravishingly chic productions of classics ("Hamlet," "Medea," "Phèdre"), is more overtly theatrical, as is Mr. Fiennes's characterization. But as "Faith Healer" insists, there is certainly more than one way to tell a story, and this version's emotional flashiness plays well on Broadway. The physical production (designed by Jonathan Fensom) remains subtle and austere, with extraordinary, crepuscular lighting (by Mark Henderson) that slyly seems to be generated by the characters' changing moods.

If there is a weak link, as impossible as this sounds, it is Ms. Jones, the remarkable American actress who won a Tony Award last year for "Doubt." It's not just that her Anglo-Irish accent is uncertain. She is too palpably strong as a woman who sees her very identity erased by the man she loves. But Ms. Jones's fierce, artful balance between resentment and agony, between disgust and wonder, is beautifully sustained in ways that finally enhance the play's emotional patterns.

Mr. McDiarmid, a stalwart of the London stage, is beyond reproach. With his blatantly dyed orange hair and shabby showman's attire, his Teddy registers at first as a pathetic joke, a seedy old vaudevillian with a repertory of showbiz anecdotes about earlier acts he managed, like the whippet that played the bagpipes. But this jocularity is a shield that slips. And when his narrative strays into descriptions of humiliation and loss, the hurt breaks through the bravado like a fist through papier-mâché.

In like manner Mr. Fiennes plays up the showman in Frank. There are vestiges here of Laurence Olivier as the decaying music hall performer in John Osborne's "Entertainer," conveying the same mixed urges to ingratiate and alienate. But beyond the contempt and charm is an awareness of imponderable darkness within. You sense it when he speaks of foreseeing the play's climactic event and opens his mouth into a maw that becomes a black hole

That's in the opening scene. In the play's conclusion, when Frank walks willingly into that darkness, he glows with solar radiance. This is unquestionably Frank's apotheosis, the consummation he has sought all his life.

Like the place names that are recited as if to rosary beads, gestures echo one another throughout the monologues. There is one in particular, with arms stretched toward the audience, that suggests the laying on of hands, of fingers reaching out to touch, to connect.

The tragedy for the characters in "Faith Healer" is that while connection among them is elusive, the memory of fleeting contact remains and scalds. That the same might be said of the play's effect upon us is, more than anything, what makes "Faith Healer" a major work of art.

THE NEW YORKER
CRISIS OF FAITH

Brian Friel on terror and talent.

By JOHN LAHR

“The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide,” Oscar Wilde said. The aphorism came to mind as I was watching the Gate Theatre production of the four eloquent monologues on the paradox of talent which make up Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer” (imported from Dublin to the Booth, under the elegant direction of Jonathan Kent). The subject of the monologues is the Irish faith healer Frank Hardy (Ralph Fiennes)—the “Fantastic Francis Hardy,” as the threadbare banner behind him proclaims. Frank’s speeches are the first and last of the evening; through their evasions, omissions, and confessions, they chart the trajectory of his self-destruction. Frank’s wife, Grace (Cherry Jones), and his manager, Teddy (the superb Ian McDiarmid), are the other witnesses to the healings he calls his “performances”—and to the price they all pay for his occasional miracles. Together, these three voices conjure up a shabby world that smells of booze and Primus stoves and stale halls deep with dust and wishes.

As the play begins, coals gutter suggestively in the grate of an upstage fireplace, and the rumpled Frank stands before us in the crepuscular gloom. He carries in his jacket pocket a weathered newspaper clipping, testimony to a “remarkable event” in a Methodist church in a small Welsh town where he cured ten people of ailments “ranging from blindness to polio.” As Frank, Fiennes is outstanding. He exudes a natural, reticent magnetism; gaunt and thin, his sensitive features belie a fierce heart. Fiennes’s Frank is a compelling bundle of prowess and panic. His blessing is also his burden. The chipper Teddy, who claims to have handled ingenious animal acts, realizes that this client has one thing that his whippets and his pigeons don’t: intelligence. “All those bloody brains,” Teddy reflects. “They bloody castrated him.” Frank’s appealing alertness brings with it a certain self-consciousness about his “ministry without responsibility.” He is constantly questioning himself and his gift—“those nagging, tormenting, maddening questions that rotted my life.” “Precisely what power did I possess?” he asks. “Could I summon it? When and how?” In this “feud between himself and his talent,” as Grace calls it, the faith healer is a stand-in for every artist: he never quite comprehends the source of his own freakish gift; he can only work, wait, and pray for it to come. In the meantime, both for his audience and for himself, he hides his doubts about his mastery. “You’re beginning to masquerade, aren’t you?” he says to himself. Frank is certain of only one thing: “I always knew when nothing was going to happen.”

In the course of the play, his inspiration becomes more and more scarce; at the same time, his drinking increases, and so does his abuse of Grace, whose love and loyalty he trivializes by referring to her as his “mistress” and by denying the existence of their stillborn son. (Even Grace can’t acknowledge Frank’s awful abandonment at the moment of the baby’s birth, in the back of a van.) Frank’s devotion is not to her but to those rare occasions when he finds himself in miraculous harmony with his talent. “I knew that for those few hours I had become whole in myself, and perfect in myself, and in a manner of speaking, an aristocrat,” he says. Inevitably, the story of his struggle to recapture his spiritual powers becomes, instead, the story of the loss of a soul.

Sitting at a table, drinking and smoking as she talks, Grace tells us how she ran away with Frank as a rebellion against the stifling punctilio of the professional class into which she was born: her stolid father was a judge and she a newly qualified lawyer when she first met Frank and joined his raffish, peripatetic life. Grace is nervy and fragile and, as Jones expertly plays her, on the verge of hysteria. She is also mesmerized by Frank’s performance of sensitivity. “He had a special . . . magnificence,” she says. Grace can share everything with Frank except his creativity. “God, how I resented that privacy!” she says. “Many, many, many times I didn’t exist for him. But before a performance this exclusion—no, it wasn’t an exclusion, it was an erasion—this erasion was absolute: he obliterated me.” Because she envies the inspiration to which their life together is dedicated, Grace unconsciously spoils it. When Frank fails, she becomes a punishing voice, mocking his powers and subverting them with scorn.

In Friel’s brilliant storytelling, the refracted memories of the characters paint a harrowing picture of recrimination and self-aggrandizement. Lacking the courage to stop performing, Frank lets others make the choice for him. In a much recounted scene, on his return to Ireland, after years of touring through Scotland and Wales, Frank heals a man’s twisted finger at a pub. A crowd of onlookers go off to find their paralyzed friend for him to heal. “If you do nothing for him, Mister, they’ll kill you,” the bartender warns him. “I know them. They’ll kill you.” Though Frank’s intuition tells him that his power won’t come through, he nonetheless goes outside to perform for the waiting cripple. The moment plays as both a surrender and a liberation. “I had a simple and genuine sense of homecoming,” Frank says. “Then for the first time there was no atrophying terror; and the maddening questions were silent. At long last I was renouncing chance.”

NEW YORK PRESS
GOT FAITH?

Fiennes fairs not so well in Friel’s Faith Healer

By Leonard Jacobs

At first he’s painfully stooped over, a shell of a man. Then, after a rise to his full height, but looking sallow as sin, drained of his destiny, weary of the world, Ralph Fiennes begins the first of the four monologues that comprises Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. As he speaks, he focuses on us, boring into us as if to plunge us into a hypnotic lull so we may hear his story. His name: Frank Hardy. His profession: small-time faith healer, con man, miracle worker if you believe him. His story: too long. Too bad.

This first monologue is tightly packed with Frank’s tales of traversing the back roads of Scotland and Wales, and it includes the mystical, incantatory drone he uses to lament the names of towns that are mere shadows of themselves. More pertinent, he recalls skimming his lifestyle off the good graces of those pathetic and gullible locals—the hurt and the poor, the lonely and diseased—all believing he could heal their wounds, physical or psychic. And if a little hooch gets hustled in the process of setting up shop and “performing” the faith healer’s soothing salve of a show, so what? And if his lover was shrewish or loathsome, or if their marriage was a sham, so what? And if his manager—a vividly described imp who was no more an advance man for him than an army in disorganized retreat—was a ne’er-do-well, a loser, a hanger-on, a bum, a failure…well, so what?

So what, indeed, if Frank is delusional? Or at least that’s what the subsequent monologues, all of which are roughly the same length (30–40 minutes), suggest. Played by a miscast, ever-game Cherry Jones, Grace Hardy sits in her chair and slowly discloses—between crying quips, whiskey sips and chain smoking cigarette tips—that much of Frank’s narrative was either exaggerated, perversions of truth, or brews of the two. Don’t believe him, believe me, she says, and we do—for a time.

After an intermission during which most of the self-satisfied literati strutted around like peacocks showing off how much they know about Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon—which Friel’s structure recalls—we return for Act II and meet that manager. Teddy, played by the peerless Ian McDermid, is the undisputed highlight of Jonathan Kent’s otherwise long-haul production.

Unlike Frank Hardy, who is merely greasy and, for all intents and purposes, a cirrhotic charlatan wrapped in a foggy enigma, Teddy is a paradox: red-haired, Cockney and flavored with music hall on the outside, and a shell of a man—a true one, not the shell of a huckster—on the inside. You sense the crestfallen, still-sparky vaudevillian in McDermid’s tantalizing and—let’s use the word—tragic Teddy. Now, repeat the incantation: Woe to having faith in the faith healer! Woe to having faith in talent! Woe to having faith in faith!

And woe to us for slogging through Friel’s ambitious but ultimately uninspiring play. It isn’t that Fiennes doesn’t do fine work—that blank slate of a face that reads so earnest on screen reads even more so on stage; you can easily imagine how he kept the faith in his own mythical healing powers even if he healed nary a soul. And it’s not that, within each monologue, there isn’t the intense swirl of lyricism that we associate with Friel. It’s that there’s no filter for such lyricism, which leaves us with three performers, typically superb, overplaying, underplaying, unmoored in their acting. Every descriptive phrase in Faith Healer paints a magical picture. I’d settle for more of them aiding the narrative.

GLOBE & MAIL
Hallelujah! Fiennes is back on Broadway

By KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE

Rating: ***

The sheer austerity of director Jonathan Kent's revival of Faith Healer is staggering. While the vast stage of Manhattan's Booth Theatre can hardly be described as a black box, the contained quality of Jonathan Fensom's bare-minimum set design creates a similar effect. The two Jonathans are working with the knowledge that to dazzle their audiences -- and this is Broadway; dazzle is constitutional -- they need only let Brian Friel's tale of a "fantastic" faith healer roaming the British Isles cast its own, peculiar spell.

Some equally fantastic actors to tell the tale can't hurt. For this Gate Theatre of Dublin production (which opened Thursday on Broadway), Kent selected a trio of actors who live up to a twin task: ensuring this show is a success on its own terms while rescuing the play's reputation from an ill-fated, 20-performances-only production in 1979. Done and done.

That Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, The Constant Gardner and, lest we all forget, Maid in Manhattan) plays the role of Frank, the titular faith healer, has already given the box office a heck of a boost. But this is no movie star trying out the stage as a diversion à la Julia Roberts, currently starring in a revival of Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain. While his New York stage appearances have been rare (this is his first since a Tony-winning turn as Hamlet in 1995), Fiennes has kept a firm foot in theatre in Britain and Ireland. It shows. At any rate, he's joined here by two theatrical luminaries: the American Cherry Jones as Frank's partner Grace and the British actor Ian McDiarmid as their manager Teddy.

When I say "joined," I don't mean that in a literal sense. The play is written as four monologues: one each by Grace and Teddy and two by Frank. Only at the curtain call do we see the three together on stage. The four monologues recount, from different perspectives, life on the road by this travelling salesman of faith-healing and his two cohorts. Frank's insecurities, capriciousness, ego and, depending on who's telling the story, his ruthlessness are examined by Friel in a language that mixes high-flying lyricism with rugged, shockingly harsh reality. This artist (or is it charlatan?) is not content to ease the pain of strangers, but must inflict some of his own on those around him.

Each member of this bizarre triangle has an insatiable appetite for telling stories. That their memory is selective, or that their renditions of the same event varies wildly, is essential to the narrative structure of the piece and to its investigation of human memory. This is not memory as fallible in a postmodern sense, but as susceptible to manipulation, delusion and self-preservation in a tradition closer to the tall tales of folklore. Although the events in Faith Healer take place in the 1930s and beyond -- a recording of Fred Astaire's The Way You Look Tonight is a running gag -- Friel paints a world of small villages and hamlets in remote corners of Britain and Ireland that might as well be medieval.

Friel's writing is so dense it's impossible to absorb it all in one, long sitting. It encourages the audience to listen as intently as possible to the words and their idiosyncratic inflections. Each performer brings out the verbal richness of the text in his or her own way.

An unkempt Fiennes channels his Frank as a cross between a tortured artist and a charismatic cult leader. His Frank is as full of doubts about his "talent" as he is sure that he is the centre of this small corner of the universe. It's a mesmerizing performance that builds in the character's contradictions into its very architecture. Jones opts for a braver, highly theatrical display of emotions without once turning the harrowing life of Grace into histrionics. And while McDiarmid's performance was clearly the audience's favourite -- it's the out-and-out comic of the three -- I found it slightly jarring. There's no denying the skill of the performer (a stage veteran best known for his Star Wars film appearances), but he is not only performing the character here but playing up its quirky period Englishness for, I presume, the titillation of American audiences. Still, that's a relatively minor objection and the accumulative effect of the three performances outweighs a small blemish in one.

THE PHILADELPHIA ENQUIRER
'Faith Healer's' commanding spell

By Toby Zinman
For The Inquirer

"We were always balanced somewhere between the absurd and the momentous," Frank Hardy, an itinerant faith healer, tells us early on. And the tremendous challenge of Faith Healer is to maintain that precarious balance: in the story, in the performance, and in the reception.

Brian Friel's play is almost as demanding for the audience as it is for the actors, making us walk a tightrope - focused and attentive - for nearly three hours. In this brilliant production transferred to Broadway from Dublin's Gate Theatre, starring Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid, it is time thrillingly spent.

Faith Healer is so demanding because it is written in four monologues. The three characters are never onstage together (until the curtain call), and each monologue tells the same story, advancing it a bit further each time, with serious if tiny discrepancies. Truth and memory are famously self-serving, and if we pay close attention, we are led through a puzzling maze of passion and heartbreak.

The plot centers on Frank Hardy, a man who has a gift that only sometimes works. His manager, Teddy, and his wife, Grace, go from town to town, village to village, in Wales and Scotland until finally they return, fatefully, to Ireland. The invocation of place names - initially impossible for Americans to grasp - becomes a significant litany, conjuring up a locale balanced somewhere between the real and the storybook, a rural, ancient, brutal and beautiful landscape. This is Friel-land, located on the dramatic map right next door to Beckett-land.

Faith Healer is designed for a small stage and a small audience, so it is additionally challenging to create the necessary intense intimacy in a big Broadway theater on a big Broadway stage, requiring fiercely charismatic actors.

No problem there. Ralph Fiennes looks gorgeously gaunt, his deep-set eyes shadowed except when he looks upward (the lighting design is extraordinary, evoking three distinct moods); he never sits down. His voice, with its perfect diction, holds us just as, we imagine, he holds the gatherings of the sick who come for help. And so we are cast as the lame and the blind, making us believe what we, after all, know is not true. (It's a play, they are actors, etc.) His posture suggests he is so tightly wound that he cannot quite stand straight; he is so courteous, so self-deprecating, that we, like Grace and Teddy, fall in wary love.

As Grace, Cherry Jones is seated in an armchair, with a warm lamp on a table next to her - a table covered with used tissues, cigarettes and whiskey. She is so tense that her stockinged feet barely touch the floor, her body and lovely, sunny face twisted with anguish.

Jones is the new member of the cast - the men had been performing these roles in the celebrated Dublin production. Despite her consummate skill (she just left the cast of Doubt), she is hard to hear, and her accent (American? English?) wobbles. This is not only distracting because it reminds us she's acting, it also matters in the play; in Ireland, especially in Friel's Ireland, it matters if you're English or Irish; it further matters if you're from Northern Ireland.

At the start of Act 2, we meet Ian McDiarmid's Teddy, in another chair with another lamp. He is the lovable cockney, the man who devoted his life to people who tossed him aside, who calls us "dear hearts," assuming we will understand his pain and loss. This is the comic, crowd-pleasing role, performed with admirable restraint.

Brian Friel is the grand master of contemporary Irish drama. (Dancing at Lughnasa, recently in local production at the Arden Theatre, is his best- known work.) His drama is balanced somewhere between the pagan and the Christian, between belief and doubt. Faith Healer is not only about hopeless love - Grace for Frank, Teddy for Grace, Teddy for Frank - but also about a man enslaved by his calling, "this gift, this craft, this talent, this art, this magic."

Faith healing thus becomes a metaphor for art, and Frank is Friel's portrait of the artist, finally coming home, accepting the punishing force that is creativity. The audience, as Frank moves toward us at the end, becomes his surrogate killers, his definers, the point of it all. It's our greatest role.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Faith Healer review

By Frank Scheck
Booth Theatre, New York
Runs indefinitely

Brian Friel's "Faith Healer" is acknowledged as a modern classic, but it takes more than a little faith to sit through. The play, which had its world premiere in an unsuccessful Broadway production in 1979 starring James Mason, is being given a revival with a cast that should well ensure commercial success despite its challenging nature. It includes three of our finest theater performers: Ralph Fiennes, making his first Broadway appearance in more than a decade; Tony winner Cherry Jones; and Ian McDiarmid, best known as Emperor Palpatine in the "Star Wars" films.

Rather surprisingly, it's the latter performer who will garner the lion's share of acclaim and awards here. Making his New York theater debut as Teddy, the loving, downtrodden manager of an itinerant faith healer, McDiarmid delivers a tour-de-force comic performance that is as moving as it is amusing.

The play is composed of four monologues, beginning and ending with those delivered by Frank Hardy (Fiennes), the titular figure. In between, we hear from Grace (Jones), the woman who may or may not be his wife, and the aforementioned Teddy.

Over the course of a sometimes lugubrious 2 1/2 hours, the three characters relate their intersecting tales, with enough variations to make us wonder as to the actual truth. As we listen to the story of Frank, a haunted man who wanders about the villages of Wales and Scotland applying his not-always-reliable healing powers, it becomes evident that the play is a thoughtful but allusive meditation on the nature of love, faith and truth.

Those meanings, however, are more than a little difficult to discern in the rambling, amorphous text despite the best efforts of the performers. Fiennes, made to look properly seedy, subtly and skillfully conveys the pain and doubt underlying his character's presumed gifts. Jones' Grace is more obviously anguished, which the actress is able to communicate without lapsing into histrionics.

Teddy's story comes as much needed comic relief in the second act. Sporting a cockney accent and a tacky comb-over, he is a lovable, slightly ridiculous figure whose love for his troublesome client is deeply touching. He's played brilliantly by McDiarmid, in a performance so ingratiating that, for the first time, this secondary figure seems to dominate the play.

Director Jonathan Kent's production, imported (with the addition of Jones) directly from Dublin's Gate Theatre, superbly captures the mood of the piece. Particularly effective is the use of a sliding curtain between monologues, with the characters hurriedly appearing and disappearing in seamless fashion.

Bottom line: Superb performances in a difficult play that demands some faith of its own.

NEWSDAY
One story, thrice

BY LINDA WINER
Newsday Staff Writer

It seems straightforward enough: Two men and a woman deliver lengthy monologues. Each of them - small-time faith healer Frank Hardy, his woman Grace, and manager Teddy - is alone onstage for at least half an hour, after which Frank returns for a final soliloquy. The speeches relate their distinctive memories of more or less the same story, their perceptions of hard life on the shabby roads of Wales and Scotland and Ireland.

For some people, such a narrative may feel like an untheatrical slog through somebody else's distant troubles. My mind understands such a reaction to Brian Friel's exquisitely written (even overwritten) 1979 drama "Faith Healer." But my gut could not disagree more.

The revival that opened last night at the Booth Theatre is a peculiar but mesmerizing evening. Jonathan Kent's bravely exposed staging offers a microscopic yet magisterial acting lesson by Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and the dazzling Ian McDiarmid, in his overdue American debut.

Unlike many admirers of Irish playwright Friel, we are more drawn to the tough edges of his early work than to such celebrated Chekhovian embraces as "Dancing at Lughnasa." "Faith Healer," which has not been seen on Broadway since Jose Quintero directed James Mason in it 27 years ago, turns out to be more like Beckett than a Gaelic spin on "Rashomon" and "The Rainmaker."

Kent, Fiennes' theater director of choice, allows us to see faces change brutally, as if in unforgiving close-up. We don't care much about the story, but we are as rapt by the storytelling as if we had curled up with a strange, compelling novel.

Fiennes has slowed down and deepened since his brusque Hamlet of 1995. We first meet this traveling healer, hollowed and stooped, wearing a dark, ill-fitting suit and pacing a shabby meeting hall with towering dark walls. (The expertly grim sets and costumes were designed by Jonathan Fensom.)

The character of Frank gives Fiennes plenty of room for the chilly asceticism he projects so well, but Frank also toys with the seductions of showmanship, in passing twinkles of self-loathing and self-love. Yes, Frank has the power to heal, though not often and not on command. Is he a miracle worker or a con man?

When Grace shares her version of their life together, we must also ask whether he is a liar. Almost everything Frank has told us about his lover, including their legal status, turns out to be willfully delusional, at least according to her. Jones, who won Tony Awards for playing spinsters ("The Heiress") and nuns ("Doubt"), is equally ravishing as a womanly woman - smoking and drinking in a little parlor, mourning the loss of her mysterious, cruel, irresistible man.

Where Fiennes' eyes try to block our entrance, we can almost see the back of Jones' head through hers. Her skin, known for its glow, lets us glimpse something like rot below.

Then comes Teddy, the Cockney manager we have heard so much about from both Frank and Grace. With his massive comb-over and natty smoking jacket, he lives up to the seedy music-hall descriptions that precede him. This is the evening's only showy role, and McDiarmid clearly appreciates a character whose favorite word is "fantastic." But the actor takes us beyond the glitzy foolishness to reveal a man who understands artists and events with surprising mercy and clarity.

Easy facts are slippery, including the thoroughly inappropriate use of "The Way You Look Tonight" as the theme music for Frank's pathetic meetings with the sick and the lame. Hard facts are impossible to pin down. Ultimately, Friel unpeels what seems to be the truth about the fateful days when Frank cured 10 people at one haul, when Grace gave birth to their stillborn son, and when Frank finally returned to Ireland to begin a ludicrous homecoming tour.

Kent insists that "Faith Healer," for all its lurking mysticism, is really a metaphor about the ways artists damage themselves and their loved ones. When Frank and then Grace repeat, over and over, the strange, beautiful names of disappearing Welsh and Scottish towns, the sound of the damage is haunting.

VARIETY
Faith Healer review

By DAVID ROONEY

As the title character played by Ralph Fiennes in Brian Friel's "Faith Healer" intones the names of dying Welsh villages in the opening monologue, he speaks of "the mesmerism, the sedation of the incantation." Those place names become a hypnotic refrain for all three characters in this haunting drama about art and memory, life and death. In Jonathan Kent's illuminating production, the dark sorcery of language, of recitation and interpretation, powers a challenging play that stubbornly withholds its revelations as it explores the infinite nuances of truth and fabrication.

Friel's play premiered on Broadway in 1979 in a poorly received production starring James Mason that ran a mere 20 performances. Structured as four consecutive monologues from three characters who at no time share the stage, this "Rashomon"-style feat of complex storytelling examines overlapping events from conflicting perspectives. While that approach was audacious for its time, nontraditional narrative has since become more common in mainstream theater. But "Faith Healer" still requires its audience to work -- and is all the more enthralling for it.

Kent is working here in a richly theatrical idiom that enhances the drama's intricate layers. His embrace of magic and artifice is apparent in the eerie image that sweeps the stage between monologues, of a single gnarled tree in a lonely country landscape, underscored by wind and whispering voices and projected across a moving white curtain.

In a production designed with meticulous precision, the three characters appear to be conjured by lighting illusionist Mark Henderson out of brooding darkness, hovering between flesh and spirit.

And Kent artfully harnesses the three distinct acting styles of the excellent cast to mirror Friel's multiple takes on the same events. In addition to the treacherous waters of memory, the playwright reflects with searching introspection on the creative process, on the making of art as a transformative release but also as a potential snare plagued by uncertainties of chance, weight and trustworthiness.

"A craft without an apprenticeship, a ministry without responsibility, a vocation without a ministry," is how the title character describes his profession.

Self-doubt is disturbingly evident in Frank Hardy (Fiennes), the eponymous Irishman who travels the back roads of Wales and Scotland, hawking his all-purpose miracles to a dwindling public. "Am I endowed with a unique and awesome gift?" Frank asks. "Am I a con man?" Those questions are bounced back and forth by the faith healer; his long-suffering wife (or is she merely his lover?), Grace (Cherry Jones); and his loquacious Cockney manager, Teddy (Ian McDiarmid).

The names of the towns are the same for each of the three characters, but their accounts of the events that took place in them vary wildly. The task of wading through the murky depths of memory to separate lies from truth fuels the play's unsettling suspense. The deepest scars clearly have been left by Grace's stillborn child, buried by the side of a road in northernmost Scotland, and by the trio's return to Ireland years later to Friel's mythical Donegal village of Ballybeg, where the doomed Frank's gifts were tested by the locals in a pub.

Fiennes is given the tough job of re-creating a role forever associated with Donal McCann's reportedly unforgettable interpretation. In the opening monologue, in particular, the actor's work feels somewhat underpowered. He looks gaunt and unshaven in a shabby suit, and while his intelligence and quiet charisma are never in doubt, the character remains distant, dreamily absent at times and knowingly enigmatic at others. Fiennes' cool approach perhaps leaves us too much time to consider his impressive technique. There's nothing superfluous in the performance: Every gesture, expression, pause and inflection is carefully controlled.

It's in the surprising ripple effect that continues later, through Grace and Teddy's testimonies and in his own commanding final monologue, that Fiennes' characterization assumes the vivid shape of a man whose cruelty and selfishness are matched by his personal torment.

While Jones has not mastered the accent of an Irishwoman -- even one long absent from her home -- her work is powerful and affecting. The daughter of a sententious judge, Grace is a soul unable to find rest; she both loves and despises Frank but is passionately loyal to him. "God, he was such a twisted man," she says. "With such a talent for hurting."

In her painful endurance of the wounds of exclusion, of Frank's hubris and self-absorption, the character conveys in almost shockingly naked terms a suggestion of Friel's own contemplation of the difficulty of living with an artist.

Shifting gears once again from Fiennes' microscopically detailed intensity and Jones' raw emotionalism, McDiarmid gives the production's most astonishing perf, inhabiting colorful raconteur Teddy with more than a hint of Archie Rice. Looking elegantly tatty in his dusty red velvet tux, the winking vaudevillian showman cheerfully gulps beer after beer while reminiscing about his entrepreneurial past, proudly celebrating the talents of Miss Mulato and her Pigeons or Rob Roy, the bagpipe-playing whippet. Like his endorsement of those dubious novelty acts, Teddy seems unconcerned whether Frank's gift is chicanery or genius.

McDiarmid creates a tragicomic figure whose convivially conversational manner makes the cracks in his composure cut deeper. Failing to abide by his own rule of "strictly business," Teddy's love of Frank and Grace, his unrewarded devotion, loss and sorrow are searingly, heartbreakingly rendered.

Ultimately, however, despite the contrasting skills of these fine actors, it's the melancholy beauty of Friel's writing and the measured, cumulative lucidity of Kent's probing production that give this beguiling play its lingering resonance. As Fiennes steps slowly downstage in the final moments, there's a devastating sense of both a character and a playwright offering themselves up for judgment.

BROADWAY.COM
Faith Healer review

By Rob Kendt

Acting this good can be healing. In Brian Friel's Faith Healer, the simplest and most hypnotic show on Broadway, audiences find themselves in the capable and tender care of three very different, indeed vividly distinct, pros: Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid. Just the sound of director Jonathan Kent's spare, evocative production—those three voices, each speaking solo but between them conjuring the reverberations of a vanished world—has an intimate, unamplified musicality that practically qualifies as folk medicine in itself. Leaning in intently, as we do, to absorb such well-considered performances certainly feels cleansing.

Indeed, we might luxuriate in the acting too much to notice that Friel, like the shambling con man at the center of his play, is running something of a shell game, narratively and thematically. Fiennes plays a two-bit healer, Frank Hardy, who trolls the back roads of Depression-era Scotland and Wales with Grace (Jones), his eventual and long-suffering wife, and Teddy (McDiarmid), his vaudevillian promoter. Most nights, Frank is a whiskey-fueled sham preying on desperate, impoverished people, but on occasion, to his surprise as much as anyone's, he actually manages to cure some of them.

Those close to him aren't so easily mended. Grace and Teddy, whom we meet at some undefined point after Frank's rise and fall, both recall him as a distant, even cruel man-child with magnetic if unreliable gifts. "I wish you could have seen him," Grace says at one point, describing the "special magnificence" Frank exuded during makeshift healing services in meeting halls and abandoned churches.

Thanks to the exquisite Fiennes, we feel that we have seen at least a glimmer of Frank's radiance, and never more so than when he laughs it off as dumb luck. At times Fiennes seems to be floating inside Frank's seamy suit and pathetic little green tie, as if he's found some secret way to transcend the squalor around him; other times he stands at a doubtful angle, defying gravity to answer him. Fiennes' nervy, mannered precision can seem cold when it's frozen on film; onstage, in this part at least, his every flash and flutter registers with uncanny immediacy.

The marvel of Jones' virtuoso monologue as Grace is its scale. Shoeless and planted in a chair by a small table stocked with whiskey and cigarettes, Jones paints a broad-stroked portrait of barely contained grief but shades it with palpable delight, doing a kind of dance without leaving her seat. Perhaps most heartbreakingly, she captures and somehow ennobles the signal trait of enablers everywhere: a sweetly doting devotion to her bad choices.

But then, in Friel's overdetermined tragic vision, does anybody really have choices? The promoter Teddy, we're told, was "born into show business," and as McDiarmid plays him, he's an ageless imp in a red smoking jacket with a comb-over and a tiny, almost imperceptible moustache. Sipping beer and regaling us in a sing-song Cockney honk with tall tales of the road, he harps on his homespun philosophy about artists—the best of whom, he believes, have sensational talent and not "two brains to rub together."

When Teddy announces his ironclad rule not to mix business and friendship, we recognize this immediately for what it is: the flimsiest of dramatic straw men, set up to be torn down and trampled by his emotionally fraught tours of duty with Frank and Grace. The worst of these junkets, a fate-freighted Irish homecoming in Friel's mythical Ballybeg, forms the climax of all four parts (monologues by Frank open and close the show). Of course, no character escapes a Friel play with a clean emotional bill of health, but the playwright's schematic storytelling—the elliptical feints; the sometimes perceptive, often overstated metaphors; the conjurer's mix of premonition and hindsight—starts to creak under its own self-important weight, particularly as the evening approaches the three-hour mark.

Still, you won't hear Friel's language, which is lyrical to a fault, sounding any richer than it does coming from this trio. For the sheer pleasure of taking the air with these guardedly garrulous narrators, Faith Healer is a heartily recommended restorative.

Big stars hit Broadway with mixed results
By Chris Jones
Tribune arts critic

NEW YORK --
Stars of other media are nothing new on Broadway. But when the final curtains let out on West 45th Street, an especially intense kind of celebrity chaos currently ensues.

Most of the fuss is about Julia Roberts, starring in Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain" at the Jacobs Theatre. But a few steps away, tourists seek sightings of David Schwimmer, the Lookingglass Theatre Ensemble member readying his Broadway debut in "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial." Directly across the street reside Julianna Margulies and Ali MacGraw in "Festen." And this week, Ralph Fiennes began -- on West 45th Street -- previews for Brian Friel's "Faith Healer." It's quite the logjam of bold-faced names.

Celebrities, of course, are necessary to move tickets (especially to heady Greenberg plays). Roberts has sold out her entire limited run. And Harry Connick Jr. has done the same for the Roundabout Theatre's fabulous revival of "The Pajama Game," three blocks south.

For a variety of reasons -- challenge, prestige, New York media exposure, time on their hands, a desire to really act, for once -- these stars can be persuaded to work for not much money at all. Roberts makes $35,000 a week -- as opposed to her usual $20 million per picture. And Connick is making an eye-popping $1,100 per eight-show week. That will hardly keep him in limos. A single ticket to one of the benefit performances he's agreed to do in June costs three times that.

Risky business

But there are serious risks for all concerned. Celebrities may or may not be any good. They're under enhanced scrutiny. And if they embarrass themselves, a lot of people lose in a lot of different ways. And there's no big payday to wipe away the pain.

Connick's work under Kathleen Marshall's inspired direction is a textbook example of how celebrities should be used on Broadway. For a start, Connick merely is being asked to do something he can do brilliantly well already: sing, play piano and project a classic sexy male persona, circa 1954.

To a large degree, "The Pajama Game's" lead character of Sid Sorokin (a good-looking, sardonic-but-vulnerable Chicagoan stuck on a union girl he finds in a Cedar Falls, Iowa, factory) is precisely the persona Connick has been projecting on the concert stage for years. And this justly beloved, jazz-and-pop-standard score (with music by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and such swing-ballads as "Hey There") is a perfect match for those Connick tonsils.

Marshall also was smart enough to use Connick as a star she can playfully objectify.

Connick's rippling, bare chest in the show's final scene caused quite the matinee commotion in my row. And in the famous "Hernando's Hideaway" comic number, Marshall forges a true showstopper in which Connick (a fine piano player) dances, sings and tickles the keys all at once. Connick has never been on Broadway before, but he knows a thing or two about voicing and selling a song. More importantly, he's both willing to inhabit the role theatrically -- and also slightly send himself up by suggesting he's a novice among the Broadway professionals.

We know better, of course, and Connick knows we know better. That's the whole point.

The show's co-star, Kelli O'Hara, benefits greatly from the presence of a man whose moussed coif extends out across his forehead and, it seems, over most of the orchestra pit. A beautiful woman and strong actress with a crystal-clear Broadway voice, O'Hara (who appeared in the Goodman Theatre's production of "The Light in the Piazza") lacked only star quality and the confidence of a leading lady. Connick, who is generous on stage, rubs her some off his well-packed chest. And O'Hara, now assuming the mantle of a Broadway star, should be forever grateful.

Not all celebrity turns work out so well. One of the traps to be avoided is the self-effacing star -- a performer so anxious not to dominate the proceedings that he or she disappears.

Disappearing Cyndi

Although an actor-singer of considerable talent and style, Cyndi Lauper has a bit of this problem in the messy "Threepenny Opera" revival -- where the camp theatrics make us forget she's there.

And then there's Roberts.

The A-list movie star's work in "Three Days of Rain" (in a role played in Chicago by Amy Morton) is unselfish and classy (and not without interest), but her acting just doesn't project to the back of the balcony. Worse yet, Roberts doesn't scream or shout, or even talk aggressively at her co-stars, when the script requires her to do precisely that.

To disappear into a character in a serious play does not require shutting down the killer instinct that made one a movie star in the first place.

And as Connick proves, huge stars can't disappear into roles anyway. Nor should they. They are the reason people are there. They just have to learn to make their theatrical best of that complicated Broadway fusing of identities.

USA TODAY
'Faith Healer' finds Fiennes in fine form

By Elysa Gardner

NEW YORK — Tuesday night, while the rest of the country was tuned into that enduring affliction called American Idol, I was enjoying the perfect antidote.

You wouldn't know it from watching Idol, but the whole point of singing is to tell a distinctive story, to honor a set of words and music with some version of emotional truth. This is also true of acting, which at its best has its own music, its particular, affecting use of tone, rhythm and dynamics.

A case in point — three of them, in fact — are now on display at Broadway's Booth Theatre, where director Jonathan Kent's Dublin-based production of Brian Friel's The Faith Healer (* * * ½out of four) opened Thursday.

Friel's 1979 play is constructed as a series of monologues, revealing highly individual, sometimes conflicting takes on a set of circumstances. Faith Healer opens and concludes with the testimony of its title character, Frank Hardy, a middle-aged Irishman who has devoted his adult life to "a ministry without responsibility," traveling around offering miracle cures to the desperate and despairing.

In between we hear from Grace, Frank's long-suffering lover and caregiver (and if you believe her rendition of events, his wife), and Teddy, his long-suffering manager. Their devotion—and Frank's apparent view of them as reliable, if often frustrating, servants — is offset by anger and ruefulness, and by Frank's own considerable self-doubt.

Through their contrasting accounts, Friel movingly examines the complex relationship between strength and vulnerability, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice, and the subjectivity of all human experience.

In the title role, Ralph Fiennes, returning to Broadway for the first time since his Tony Award-winning turn 11 years ago in Hamlet (also directed by Kent, originally for the UK's Almeida Theatre), again delivers the nuanced intensity that makes him one of our most compelling stage and screen actors. His Frank is at once defeated and defiant, a ravaged man who nonetheless retains the fire that drew, and singed, his enablers.

Fellow Tony winner Cherry Jones is, likewise, predictably captivating as Grace, adding to the string of vanity-free bravura performances with which she has spoiled Broadway audiences in recent years.

And Ian McDiarmid is fiercely funny and heart-rending as the flamboyant but haunted Teddy, who for all his protestations of professional detachment is an integral member of Frank and Grace's dysfunctional, interdependent family.

As traced here, that family's strange journey offers proof that true interpretive artists are still being nurtured in commercial art. Some commercial art, at least.

ASSOCIATED PRESS/WASHINGTON POST
REVIEW: 'Healer' an Unsettling Masterpiece

By MICHAEL KUCHWARA
The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Funny thing, memory. Not the same thing as the truth, of course, but often more compelling, particularly when you get different versions of the same tale.

And memory, in all its glorious variations, is at the center of "Faith Healer," Brian Friel's haunting, unsettling masterpiece of a play, which was revived Thursday at Broadway's Booth Theatre.

Aided by three formidable performers _ Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid _ Friel, in a series of pungent monologues, tells the tale of Frank Hardy, a charismatic charlatan of the first rank.

The Irish playwright, author of such hits as "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" and "Dancing at Lughnasa," is an expert raconteur, and "Faith Healer" brims with an almost mystical sense of story, complemented by three richly drawn characters.

Hardy is a role Fiennes was born to play. With his matinee-idol looks, Fiennes is the right actor for this vaguely overtheatrical, slightly gone-to-seed Irishman who travels the small towns of Scotland and Wales attempting to cure the afflicted.

Despite his ego, Hardy is filled with doubts _ about himself and about his chosen profession, which he calls at the beginning of the evening, "a craft without an apprenticeship, a ministry without responsibility, a vocation without a ministry."

And the man is equally uneasy about the people he was attempting to heal, folks mired in misery and often coming not for a cure but for the reaffirmation that nothing could be done for them. As Hardy puts it, they "came to seal their anguish."

Anguish, almost a despair, permeates Grace, Hardy's wife. Or is she his mistress? It's never quite nailed down, although Grace firmly believes in their matrimonial bond. She is the most loyal of helpmates, suffering through several miscarriages and the stillborn birth of one child, buried in a field in the lonely Scottish countryside.

Jones doesn't attempt an accent _ English, Irish or otherwise _ but she brings an absolute conviction to the role of a woman totally in love with a man who has snared her in an abusive relationship. It's a poignant, heartbreaking portrait of a sad, desolate woman.

Offering some comic relief, and clearly the audience favorite, is McDiarmid as Teddy, the fussy, fey Cockney manager of Hardy's travels. Wearing a red bow tie and a scarlet smoking jacket, Teddy sits on stage and drinks several bottles of beer while telling stories of his show-biz travails and commenting on Hardy and Grace.

Of all the acts Teddy handled over the years, the most memorable was a whippet named Rob Roy who played the bagpipes brilliantly but wasn't exactly on the top of his game when put out to stud. It's a deliriously bit of comic acting by McDiarmid, best known for his role as Palpatine in the "Star Wars" movies.

In their monologues, the actors all mention one specific event, a fateful night in the small Irish town of Ballybeg (the setting for many of Friel's plays). Hardy has returned to his Irish roots and is attempting to come to terms with what he does by healing one last time.

What happens during that night is only hinted at in the first three monologues of the evening, but then becomes clearer in a fourth, when Fiennes makes another appearance to tie up the plot _ well, at least clarify it a bit.

The production, which originated at the Gate Theatre in Dublin earlier this year, is directed by Jonathan Kent in a straightforward manner that's dazzling in its simplicity and yet very theatrical. It's framed by designer Jonathan Fensom's spare, almost barren setting for each actor _ playing areas that magically change when a billowing white curtain is pulled across the stage.

"Faith Healer" was seen on Broadway in 1979 with a cast that included James Mason, Clarissa Kaye and Donal Donnelly. It ran only 20 performances. Time has treated the play well. And with the current sterling cast, this most intricate of Friel's plays should have a happier _ make that a longer _ life in New York.

NEW YORK POST
FIENNES & CO. RENEW FAITH IN THE THEATER

By CLIVE BARNES

RALPH Fiennes, in a seedy, shabby suit, hat held to his chest, shambles to the front of the stage, his eyes gleaming with a kind of crazy fulfillment, a man at the end of a journey he never really understood.

A man who, fueled with booze, kept going with an uncertain yet unwavering ego and the dauntless despair of a Beckett tramp, is walking out to . . . well, better not say what he's walking out to.

That, after all, is something to be discovered slowly at Brian Friel's "Faith Healer," which opened last night at the Booth Theatre.

When is a play not a play? Perhaps when it is, like this one, four monologues (the hero speaks twice) delivered "Rashomon" style, offering different views of similar events seen through very different viewpoints.

Here then is the deliberate limitation of "Faith Healer" - it avoids any confrontation, except by audience inference, between the actors. The essential thrust and parry of dramatic convention has been abandoned.

Play or not, "Faith Healer" is, to use one of its key words, a "fantastic" theatrical experience, outdistancing the current Broadway pack by a country mile, with three performances to be treasured in memory, and reinforcing Friel's position as one of the three or four finest living English-speaking playwrights.

"Faith Healer" has Fiennes as Frank Hardy, an Irish-born, down-at-heel itinerant faith healer, going around tiny village halls in Wales, Scotland and finally Ireland accompanied by his wife, Grace (Cherry Jones), the lawyer daughter of a judge, and Ian ("Star Wars") McDiarmid as Teddy, his ever accommodating Cockney manager.

Is Frank a healer? When the mood is on him, he's healed with the laying of hands and the exercise of faith. Or is he, as Grace's father maintained, "a mountebank"? Most certainly.

Or perhaps, as Teddy staunchly suggests, he's one of those great natural stars like Laurence Olivier or Gracie Fields.

As the Celtic mists of uncertainty whirl around Friel's odd trio, his mystery of faith and chance, trust and betrayal unfolds, and the characters emerge with uncanny life.

"Faith Healer" has been seen on Broadway before, in 1979 with the great James Mason, Clarissa Kaye (Mason's wife) and Donal Donnelly, but it failed to connect, despite Mason and Donnelly's unquestionable virtuosity.

What somehow disappointed then, now - with this electrically charged new staging by Jonathan Kent - has you on the edge of your seat, waiting, wondering.

Fiennes, seemingly born for the play, is a remarkably intimate actor. He shares confidences rather than tells stories, largely by an unusual technique of subtly combining the bravura splurge of the stage with the micromanagement of the movies.

Dismiss, at your peril, McDiarmid's performance as a glossily deft Cockney music-hall turn, for layered beneath all that fascinating glitter is a depth of human feeling, a range of human sympathy, that transcends Friel's outlines and digs deep into the complexity of his character.

And finally there's Jones, who has made luminosity into an art form, honesty into a means of histrionic communication, and nakedness into a state of dramatic being.

This is an evening of the most wonderful theater. As I was leaving, a woman was asking her companion: "What did it all mean? Could he or couldn't he do miracles?"

He could at the performance I saw, lady!

NEW YORK SUN
Peddling a Faulty Elixir

By ERIC GRODE

From the number of trained pigeons in a vaudeville act to the circumstances leading up to a central act of violence, the sumptuously written monologues that make up Brian Friel's "Faith Healer" undermine and contradict one another in ways big and small. Mr. Friel's minor masterpiece of 1979, which adds an ominous undercurrent of violence to his usual strains of Chekhovian discontent, finds rich veins of longing as it explores the inherent slipperiness of truth.

Unfortunately, director Jonathan Kent and two-thirds of his cast - a typically brooding Ralph Fiennes and an atypically brassy Cherry Jones - have taken this uncertainty as a cue to belabor every potentially meaningful filigree, resulting in a dismayingly leaden revival of a play that deserves better.

Even when the writing promises to transform its scruffy title character into a haunted icon of self-flagellation - and "Faith Healer" contains some of Mr. Friel's sharpest, most unsparing prose - Mr. Kent's glacial tempo yanks script and performers alike into a morass of drawn-out pauses and mannered orations. The flesh here is all too willing, and so the spirit is weak. Not even a late dose of character-actor heroics by Ian McDiarmid can resuscitate the oppressive goings-on.

The three characters, who never share the stage, are: Frank Hardy (Mr. Fiennes), a moody traveling evangelist; Grace (Ms. Jones), Frank's long-suffering wife and nursemaid; and Teddy (Mr. McDiarmid), his irrepressible Cockney manager. The trio drive around Scotland and Wales, attracting a small but steady stream of "the crippled and the blind and the disfigured and the deaf and the barren," as Frank describes them.

Judging from Frank's threadbare clothes and anxious smile, business could be better on the faith-healing front. He succeeds in his ministrations just often enough to keep himself in a drunken state of anguish over his gifts: "Could my healing be effected without faith? But faith in what? - in me? - in the possibility? - faith in faith? And is the power diminishing?"

These concerns permeate the trio's various troubles, both minor (constant money woes, a rickety van) and major (a stillborn child, the alcoholism that either parallels or precipitates Frank's fading abilities). While the particulars vary significantly from monologue to monologue, things clearly come to a head during a longdelayed return to Ireland, where they encounter a rowdy wedding party at that Ballybeg pub. It quickly becomes apparent that, while the details may never be known, Frank's crisis of conscience will reach a breaking point this evening.

The four monologues - Frank concludes "Faith Healer" with a second, shorter speech - are limpid, painterly chunks of writing, as Mr. Friel moves from Frank's haunted musings to Grace's spare reminiscences to Teddy's huckster blarney and back again. But they run the risk of curdling if they're treated too reverently, which is exactly what happens here.

Of the three performers, only Mr. Fiennes is given free rein of Jonathan Fensom's bare, vaguely rustic set. (Poor Ms. Jones has been consigned to a chair for her entire monologue.) Frank stands inches from the lip of the stage, scuttles back to the farthest wall, and roams from side to side. And Mr. Fiennes supplies a comparable array of acting tools to fill the space: Cocking one hand on his hip, grinning nervously as if out of habit, assuming a broken posture, his Frank is still capable of presenting the outward appearance of a showman, but just barely.

Ms. Jones's jittery take on the fragile Grace may be her loosest, earthiest performance in years, but her sedentary blocking forces her to rely too heavily on vocal histrionics and overemphatic body language. She does, however, make a convincingly inexperienced smoker, lunging at each puff out of rhythm with the cadences of her speeches. And while both find their share of compelling moments - Frank's defensive anger at his damaged supplicants, Grace's spare account of a tiny grave in northern Scotland - they're also surprisingly careless with their accents, with a touch of Ms. Jones's Bronx-based mother superior from "Doubt" even slipping in at one point.

The real miracle worker in this production is Mr. McDiarmid, a London stage veteran best known in America for his villainous appearances in the "Star Wars" movies. Like Bradley Cooper, who stole "Three Days of Rain" out from under Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd,Mr.McDiarmid comes in last and is asked to handle most of the humor. And as with Mr. Cooper, a surprising amount of the play's emotional weight finds its way into his seemingly carefree material.

Even when his Teddy is in pure jokester mode - his description of a dimwitted, bagpipe-playing whippet dog formerly in his employ is as funny a set piece as you'll find in any non-comedy - Mr. McDiarmid shows glimmers of the enormously complex relationship Teddy has with his meal ticket. Reverence, frustration, disappointment, love, envy: All of these flash over Teddy's face, albeit channeled through a showman's bluster.

Mr. McDiarmid's irresistible prattlings give this "Faith Healer" the first and only real sense of breaking free, of elevating the text rather than obeying it. When Frank looks back on his marriage earlier in the play, he says of Grace's steadfastness: "That very virtue of hers - that mulish, unquestioning, indefatigable loyalty - settled on us like a heavy dust." A similar dust of piety hangs over this well-intentioned but enervating revival. Even on those increasingly common days when Frank's powers evade him, he's never laid his hands on a vibrant body and left it paralyzed. Mr. Kent comes perilously close to doing just that.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

'Faith' works wonders

By Howard Kissel

Frank Hardy, the title character in Brian Friel's unsettling echo chamber of a play, "Faith Healer," has a genuine gift for healing.

It has not, however, made him into a man of faith - he is alcoholic, self-destructive, cruel and profound cynical.

We learn about Hardy from four monologues - two of them delivered by Hardy himself (Ralph Fiennes), at the beginning and the end of the play. In between we hear from his wife, the tellingly named Grace (Cherry Jones), and his manager, Teddy, a high-spirited cockney (Ian McDiarmid.)

They all recount the same incidents, but no two tellings are quite the same. They involve cases where Frank actually heals people, and the bleak night when he is absent as his wife gives birth to a stillborn child in the back of a van.

As Frank, Fiennes exhibits a kind of subdued charm that masks a turbulent soul.

He has a sheepish grin, in part perhaps a result of his being constantly pickled, but more from his sense of being in a weird branch of show business. Even the way he shuffles gracefully around the stage suggests a song-and-dance man rather than a man of the cloth.

Jones displays that fortitude and defiant nobility we associate with long-suffering, self-sacrificing Irish womanhood. The daughter of a judge, she has, in his eyes, degraded herself to follow Frank. (Whether they are actually married is, like much else in the play, uncertain.)

However deep her own sense of Frank's unworthiness, Jones has a radiance that suggests her love for him strengthens her.

The troubling paradoxes of their relationship are turned absolutely topsy-turvy in Teddy's version of their lives.

McDiarmid (probably best known from the "Star Wars" films) has a beguiling raffishness that suggests Teddy had been in English music hall.

After the intense, self-lacerating monologues of the others, his dazzling storytelling (especially his uproarious account of another client, a whippet who played bagpipes) is like a blaring Dixieland band after a hushed string quartet.

"Faith Healer," which ran briefly on Broadway with James Mason in 1979, has been given a starkly simple production, designed by Jonathan Fensom. Jonathan Kent has directed it with comparable economy, placing strong demands on our imagination.

Because the characters never interact onstage, their conflicting voices echo in our minds long after we leave the theater.

On another front in the ongoing Irish invasion of Broadway, Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," a sardonic portrait of the devastating "logic" of terrorism, has been transferred uptown with all its jolts and affronts, all its black humor as pungent as before.

These are two extraordinary, unforgettable evenings.

Playbill (May 5, 2006)

PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Faith Healer: Friel-Wheeling and Real
By Harry Haun

First-nighters are ill-equipped for real life—that’s why we go to the theatre—so it inevitably comes as rude awakenings to our stage fantasies-in-progress. Hence, Faith Healer required more faith-healing than we expected May 4 at the Booth Theatre.

Midway through the Cherry Jones portion of the program, there was some sort of medical emergency in the premium seats down front, and a woman was rushed for the exit by a phalanx of friends. Unthrown and thoroughly professional, Jones pressed on.

“Well, what’s a girl to do?” the actress said helplessly a few hours later at the rather subdued after-party at the Bryant Park Grill. “I felt so badly for the dear woman—whom I actually know—and she’s going to be okay. And she’s going to get a call from all of us tomorrow to reassure her. Everyone dealt with the situation so beautifully, I thought.”

Stuff happens, and, on both sides of the footlights, one deals as well as one can. “The night that The New York Times was here,” she recalled, “there was a poor woman who had a horrible coughing fit in the front row—dead center—and I felt as badly for her as I’m sure she must have felt for me. I wish that I could have offered her some of my whiskey.”

Brian Friel’s 1979 play is a quartet of interlocking monologues that ruminate "Rashomon"-like over the same incidents, and Jones’ is the 90-proof one that comes up second. She plays a woman—wife? mistress?—who travels the backroads of Scotland and Wales with a charismatic (if not always consistent) faith healer and his Cockney manager.

Ralph Fiennes, in the title role, bookends the evening with two monologues, and Ian McDiarmid opens the second act with his recollections that clock in at almost an hour.

The Faith Healer was born on Broadway but only lingered for 20 performances, and this revival is to set the record straighter, if not straight. “I think, unashamedly, that it’s one of the great plays of the last 50 years,” declared its director, Jonathan Kent, who obviously engineered its second coming. (The raves in the morning papers and the tough-ticket status the show now enjoys for its limited run through July 30 make him right as rain.)

“It’s wonderful to bring it back to Broadway where it was first premiered. What’s great so far is that people are coming in droves, and it seems at last to be finding its audience.”

One of the most striking things that Kent has accomplished with this noble resurrection is the intimacy of the acting. All three hands relay their respective stories as if they were in a camera close-up. “Well,” he quickly pointed out, “that’s a wonderful theatre. You can have intimate acting there. And, listen—I’ve three of the best actors of their generation.”

The frail Friel, at 77, made the scene with use of a cane and was plainly pleased with the revival, but he wasn’t selling the original short just because its run was short. “It didn’t last long, but James Mason was very good,” he said. The Faith Healer would be the last stage appearance of Mason, as well as that of his wife, Clarissa Kaye.

Fiennes’ approach to the role is closer to the vest, more one on one, than Mason’s—and therefore closer to the audience. “That’s the only way I can do it,” he remarked. “It has to be like you’re hearing it from me to you directly. The reason that any of us is speaking is because the audience is right there. The only reality is that you are there—the audience.”

Aside from a chance to work again with Kent (who steered his Hamlet to a Tony Award), Fiennes is fiercely attracted to the play itself. “I think it is Friel’s best. It’s biblical in its Scope—in its ideas about love, death, parents, children, partnership, mystery, faith, faith-healing. It’s a big play.”

The major revelation of the production is the show-stealing work of McDiarmid, making his better-late-never Broadway debut at age 61. (Donal Donnelly, it has to be said, mercilessly made out like a bandit in this role as well in the original production.)

“I’m very, very found of this character,” McDiarmid admitted. “We did this play in London about five years ago when Jonathan Kent and I ran the Almeida Theatre. We did it as one of our last productions. It’s a play we’ve loved a long time, and Brian Friel really enjoyed that production so we decided to have another go—in Dublin and on Broadway.

“They are wonderful words, and they may have found their time now. It’s a play that’s very close to Brian’s heart and his wife’s heart. I know they’re happy to be here with Jonathan’s production. So we hope a lot of people will come see it and like it.”

McDiarmid’s credits—which include five villainous roles in the "Star Wars" series and an Olivier Award-winning portrayal of Einstein in "Insignificance"—go on for five inches in his Playbill biography, so a Theatre World Award as one of 2005-6’s New Faces may seem a little silly, but he qualifies nonetheless. “This is my first time on an American stage. In fact, I’ve never actually worked in the United States before. I’ve done a few American movies, but they were always filmed in England or Australia or Europe.”

At the end of his considerable credits is the line: “Ian McDiarmid is appearing with the permission of Actors’ Equity.” He nodded and smiled. “Yeah, well, I’m grateful to them for letting me come. We have lots of actors who are very welcome in England so it’s nice to have a few more be welcomed in the United States. Having had a taste of Broadway, I’d love to come back some day.”

Oscar winners Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand and Steven Soderberg and Tony winners Zoe Caldwell, Ben Vereen, Jane Alexander and Brian Stokes Mitchell headed the guest list, along with three playwrights of varying degrees of Irishness—Terrence McNally, the riding-high Martin McDonagh (who has yet to read the raves for The Lieutenant of Inishmore) and John Patrick Shanley. Also: Christopher Meloni, Anna Wintour, Lily Rabe, Maria Friedman (whose gig at Cafe Carlyle commenced May 3), Peter Dinklage, director-choreographer Martha Clarke, Rachel York, directors Neal Jordan and Doug Hughes, Constantine Maroulis and Calvin Klein.

Shanley remembered and rued the day he let the original Faith Healer get by him. “I’ve kicked myself every since that I didn’t see it because I loved James Mason so much,” he said, “but I was poor so I couldn’t buy a ticket. But I did read the play then and it has stayed with me, and tonight I finally saw the text illuminated for the first time. It’s magic.”

Like McDonagh, Shanley is giving playwriting a rest and turning to movies. “I’m doing a movie with Norman Jewison this summer called `Accordion.' It’s about a woman who plays the accordion. It takes place in New Orleans after Katrina, and we’ll be shooting it there.” (Jewison directed a Shanley script to an Oscar for "Moonstruck.")

Sarah Paulson, leading the cheers in Cherry Jones’ corner, said they won’t be touring together in Doubt. “I’m doing ‘Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip’ for NBC. We just found out today we’ve been picked up so I can’t do the tour. I would have loved to have done it, although I can’t imagine anyone could top Heather Goldenhersh. But she won’t be doing it, either, because she’s doing a TV series, too—‘The Class’ for CBS.

Brian F. O’Bryne hasn’t decided if he’ll do the Doubt tour. “I hope he does,” said Jones.

My favorite moment at the party was my fast encounter with Zoe Caldwell, around whom some stage-return rumors are swirling—so, What’s up, Zoe? “Oh, who knows?” she shot back, accompanying that with a grand shrug that completely disguised the brush-off I was getting. C’mon, Zoe. You’ve got a fifth Tony Award performance in you!

 

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Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones, and Ian McDiarmid star in Brian Friel's play Faith Healer, directed by Jonathan Kent.

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