At the International Festival Reviewed by Minka Paraskevova

“The Fantastic Francis Harvey – Faith Healer – One night only”.  The poster bearing this legend screams out on the almost-bare stage, and its appearance in all scenes binds together the fates of Faith Healer’s three characters – and their painful, burning memories.

This is the mesmerizing and, at times, deadly terrifying story of Frank the faith healer, Grace – his wife, often dismissively presented as his mistress – and Teddy, the bubbly manager we see curing his past wounds with alcohol.  Their monologues are fragmentary and misty in character, with missing pieces left for the audience’s own imagination to fill.

Playwright Brian Friel’s masterful development of the plot comes to its gradual culmination in the final scene, when we learn about the tragic love triangle between the three of them and of Frank’s chilling eventual fate.  All remarkable individuals, we hear of the stark pain of loss of a child born in a remote Scottish village, the inevitable suicide of Grace, and her fatal love for Frank.

Owen Roe’s powerful presence on the stage builds up the character of Frank as the relentless husband, who himself looks for a cure through a reconnection with his Irish homeland.  Grace’s helplessness is movingly played by Ingrid Craigie, who has ironically wound up in the same area of Paddington as Teddy (Kim Durham) – possessor of weird but entertaining memories of his life with the Harveys. 

The characters never meet on stage; they appear separately, wrapped into their own thoughts and emotions, much as we are always isolated when our memory is roaming. No doubt, Faith Healer is one of the finest contemporary Irish plays, with an intricately-textured story.  If it were to be simple, it should have been, as Teddy says, “a story about a whistling dolphin”… but it is not.