FAITH HEALER (Old Vic in Camera)****

 

By Dave

Link: https://www.oldvictheatre.com/availability/old-vic-in-camera/faith-healer Tickets £10-40 (I think there's a limited number at each price and you pay what you can afford)

Available until: Can only be watched live. Final performance is on Saturday 19^th September, 7.30pm.

I’ll be honest. It took me a little while to get into Faith Healer. But that’s the way it is with some plays. They need a bit of investment. A bit of work on the part of the audience. It’s not like mindless telly where you can just let it wash over you. You need to stick with this one and you need to use your brain. It’s worth it. It really is.

Faith Healer by Brian Friel tells the story of faith healer Francis Hardy. He travels around the British Isles and people ask him to cure their ailments. Sometimes he can and sometimes he can’t but there are days when he’s produced miracles.

The story is told as four monologues. First there is Francis Hardy himself, talking about his work and the people in his life, particularly Grace and Teddy, the two people who travelled with him and supported him most. As you’d expect, Michael Sheen creates the character of Francis brilliantly and tells his story really well. Francis isn’t the most likeable person and I wasn’t that interested in his story at first, but with a really great actor, it’s possible to admire their talent and characterisation and the delivery of the story even if the play itself doesn’t grip you.

Then the second character appears. Grace is Francis’ partner. She lived with him and worked with him. Indira Varma gives a really emotional performance as she shows us how difficult it was to be part of Francis’ life. There were times when I wondered why she bothered – but then I knew exactly why. As she speaks, it becomes clear that her version of events is different from Francis’ in lots of ways. I found myself believing Grace’s version because Varma appears so sincere. Whatever the truth is, it’s obvious Grace believes what she’s saying.

Then Teddy comes along and the play came to life even more. You can see so much of Teddy’s character just from looking at David Threlfall. It’s not right to say Teddy is more detached from the other characters. He knows them both very well and loves them very much. That really comes out in Threlfall’s performance. But he’s not right in the middle of the relationship between Francis and Grace. He is a little way outside that and the open, chatty way he talks about them makes him seem instantly trustworthy.

Or maybe he’s not. He has his version of events too.

Francis returns at the end with a second monologue and I felt differently about the character this time. Although it’s not always possible to know what’s true and what isn’t, I felt like I knew Francis better after hearing from Grace and Teddy. He is the same character but a more sympathetic one. Very flawed. But aren’t we all?

There are so many ways of looking at this play. When Grace first came in, I was thinking ‘Francis hadn’t been completely honest here’, but then Teddy came in and I started to wonder about Grace. Just because she believes something, that doesn’t mean it’s true. People say things that aren’t true all the time. If you ask people where they left something and it’s not there, they’re not usually lying (at least, I hope not or I’m a really big liar). Three people can look back on the same event and have very different memories of it. We all interpret moments differently and we remember them in different ways and that affects what we say when we talk about them. Maybe everyone has their own truth. Maybe we don’t need to know more than that.

This is a really interesting play and a great choice for a socially distanced because (apart from the curtain call, when they didn’t get close), the characters are never onstage together. They talk about their interactions, but we don’t see them. So the Old Vic didn’t have to adapt the play – they could stage it as it was meant to be staged. I think it’s really important to stage plays like this. There are some great examples of plays which have been adapted to suit current times, but there are also some plays which already suit social distancing. The Old Vic have found one, assembled a top-notch cast and given us an evening that really feels like theatre as it used to be.