Michael Sheen, David Threlfall and Indira Varma discuss being back on stage at Old Vic for Brian Friel’s play. Tickets are still on sale here and can be purchased up to 24 hours before each show.
Also, check out some photos from Faith Healer rehearsals on our gallery:
For many, it is his greatest play. Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) is a haunting and transfixing piece of theatre: a drama that shape-shifts as tantalisingly as memory. And, like all masterpieces, it feels both timeless and timely. Yet, says actor Michael Sheen, who plays lead character Frank in a new live-streamed performance opening tonight at London’s Old Vic, “When it first came out there was a big discussion about whether it was even dramatic at all.”
“I find that extraordinary,” he adds. “It’s one of the most thrilling theatrical experiences I’ve had.”
On the surface, it’s certainly simple: a series of monologues on a near-empty stage. Three narrators — Frank, the itinerant Irish “faith healer” of the title; Grace, his wife; Teddy, his cockney manager — address us separately, recalling their ramshackle lives on the road, as they traipsed round remote parts of Scotland and Wales trying to drum up business with a shabby poster. Each character takes their turn in the limelight. At the Old Vic, Sheen heads up a stellar cast, with Indira Varma playing Grace and David Threlfall taking the part of Teddy.
But what begins straightforwardly soon develops the grip of a detective story. We gradually realise that the trio’s recollections don’t add up: each monologue sheds new — sometimes shocking — light on the earlier ones. Frank appears more complex with each telling. And as the audience pieces together the fragments of information, the play delicately exposes the fragility of memory, the power of narrative and the hunger for meaning. “They were a despairing people,” says Frank at one point, recalling the lost and lonely souls who would turn up in dank village halls on dark winter evenings in the hope of cure, resolution or benediction.
The Old Vic staging arrives at a time when uncertainty is the order of the day and a piece composed of competing narratives and disputed facts feels acutely relatable. Meanwhile the question that hovers around the charismatic Frank — genius or conman? — also hits home now, as we contemplate the damage done by populist leaders and seductive rhetoric.
Friel grew up in a Catholic community in Northern Ireland in the 1930s, and Faith Healer was written at the height of the Troubles. While the play never addresses that political situation directly, many have noted that its wisdom about identity, place and belonging surely draws on Friel’s lived experience of a divided society. “You can’t grow up in the place where Friel did without having a sense of competing realities, competing narratives, competing stories,” says Sheen.
“It’s about the ambiguity of everything,” adds Threlfall. “And, like any great play, it is specific and universal at the same time. We’re in the middle of truth-seeking at the moment aren’t we? You don’t have to look very far for the analogy…”
But any larger political resonance with the current moment comes wrapped in something much more personal and potent. And it’s perhaps in this respect that the play feels most timely. It’s a piece composed of monologues, lonely reveries in which factual memories collide with each character’s feelings and fantasies. There is no dialogue as such, yet the three solo narrators depend on each other, bound by the events that they struggle to articulate.
“It’s accumulative,” says Varma. “Sometimes we use identical language, and then one little thing is changed. It’s like different colours being laid on top of each other. I lay one colour, David lays another, Michael lays another — and then suddenly the audience sees a new colour that’s been produced.”
Matthew Warchus’s “Old Vic: In Camera” staging of this collage of lonely voices is a “scratch performance”, pulled together under the peculiar circumstances of semi-lockdown and performed live onstage but to a remote audience tuned in via Zoom (viewers book tickets to watch online). Where normally the cast might have rehearsed together for weeks, for this performance they have trodden a more solitary path to a final few days in the theatre. The audience, likewise, have all been through lockdown. It’s a play that might speak afresh to viewers familiar with solitude, doubt and reflection, says Sheen.
“Why are there three different versions of events?” he asks. “Clearly there is a lot in it to do with faith and belief — what you believe in, how much you can trust that. And there’s obviously something about how we can manipulate our own memories and use the stories we tell sometimes to illuminate and sometimes to hide, obfuscate or justify . . . The aspect of Frank that is hiding from the truth himself, avoiding the difficulties of his reality, and the kind of emotional and psychological acrobatics that you can perform in order to cover up — we can see that going on around the place a lot.”
Sheen, who has played many compelling figures in his career, including football manager Brian Clough, prime minister Tony Blair, quiz show host Chris Tarrant and a charismatic teacher in a 2011 large-scale reworking of The Passion in his native Wales, says he is fascinated by characters who have “a performative aspect to them”.
“It can often give off a sort of confidence that can then be confounded by what their inner experience is. And they’re complicated in the moral line that they walk. With Frank there is sheer fabrication, he just blatantly makes stuff up. There are all kinds of things there to do with feeling flawed, imperfect and broken. He’s the healer but he’s also the one who needs the healing.”
This staging arrives at a time of great uncertainty for theatre. The play wrestles with insecurity, and many see Frank as a conduit for Friel’s own self-doubt as a writer. For writer and critic Fintan O’Toole, “Frank Hardy is the nearest thing to an avatar in [Friel’s] own work: a haunted figure, unsure whether he’s a miracle worker or a charlatan.” And Frank himself voices confusion early in the play about the elusive nature and source of his talent: “Was it all chance?” he asks.That doubt is recognisable to many artists, says Threlfall. He cites a legendary occasion when actor Laurence Olivier, having given a dazzling performance of Othello, was found plunged in gloom: “Someone said to him, ‘What’s the matter? It was brilliant tonight.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but I don’t know how I did it.’”
Yet while Faith Healer is haunted by the fear of failure, it also celebrates the power of live performance. At one point, when Teddy describes Frank’s unexpected healing of a group of people in a shabby old church hall, he could be recalling a transformative evening of theatre. Frank is nothing without his “congregation”, just as Friel’s play is unfinished without an audience. “It’s not about the individual alone,” says Varma. “There’s something else that happens in between [the actor and the audience]. There’s an alchemy.”
There’s a particular poignancy, she adds, to delivering this play about belief and memory at a time when many theatres are closed and audiences are still limited (the Old Vic performance is partly aimed at raising money for the theatre). Friel was not a screen writer, she points out: this is a subtle verbal piece reliant on the ability of actors in a space to summon up a lost world through words.
“The play only exists if you can remember it,” she says. “Theatre only exists if we can remember Friel and all these amazing theatre writers and we can bring them alive for the audiences.”
‘Faith Healer’, Old Vic, London, September 16-19, oldvictheatre.com