Faith Healer short run at the Old Vic as part of the In Camera project was concluded last Saturday, 19, to positive reviews. Read below what the critics are saying about the play and Michael Sheen’s performance as Francis Hardy:
In the role of Frank, Michael Sheen captures the bonhomie and charm of a born performer, who only seems to exist when he’s in front of an audience. In his second monologue, which concludes the play, Sheen reveals the pain and deep insecurity underneath Frank’s acts of self-dramatisation and the terrible consequences of Frank’s loss of faith in himself and his abilities.
Sheen (Good Omens), an actor capable of volcanic zeal and rich musical vocalism, plays the “Fantastic” Frank Hardy, itinerant layer-on of hands, who we learn is often drunk and in self-exile from his native Ireland. Frank travels to backwater villages in Wales and Scotland with his miserable wife Grace (Indira Varma) and unctuous, Cockney manger Teddy (David Threlfall).
The Guardian (4/5 stars)
Modestly billed as a “scratch” production, with sparing use of music and some occasionally jarring extreme closeups, the evening has three superb performances. As the ironically named Frank, Sheen gives as rich a delivery as you could wish of the mesmeric incantation of Welsh village names remembered from the trio’s travels. His three-piece black suit is not as shabby as Friel’s stage directions advise, but he looks dressed for a funeral, which brings its own resonance.
Now my memory must also make room for Sheen’s Frank, an interpretation that grounds the character in a grimy reality in ways I hadn’t thought possible. First seen weaving through a row of empty chairs, booming out the names of Welsh towns he visited on his healing tours, he exudes the stale aroma of an old-time vaudevillian’s greasepaint.
The Telegraph (4/5 stars)
“As a young man I chanced to flirt with it and it possessed me,” Sheen’s Hardy intoned, warm, lilting, direct, eyes widening theatrically at that word ‘possessed’. In a trice, his hands were outstretched and we pictured the moment of healing in his fixed concentration – then it was thrown away in a gesture of contemptuous dismissal. That kind of minutiae was there every step of the way to the recalled rendez-vous with a sacrificial reckoning in Donegal.
Michael Sheen, the dynamic towering talent from “Frost/Nixon“, weaves his way majestically into view, speaking strongly with a tense dynamic showmanship quality that registers. He is the man at the center of this engaging, humorous posturing, throwing forward the illusion (or delusion) of spirited belief and rehabilitation. This is Francis Hardy, a mediocre faith healing artist at his best, possessing a power that even he doesn’t quite understand himself. “I did it, cause I could do it, and occasionally it did work.” Sheen shimmers with illusive magnetism, giving us not simply a liar, albeit a very very good one, but a man that embodies the whole of himself in perfect performative dynamics, with “all irony suspended“. He’s a “savage bloody man” feeding us his twisted talent, evenly and forcibly, making us tune in and pay complete and total attention, even as he registers the hurting that he wields outward. There is tragedy coming towards him, a dark weight descending, but Friel doesn’t give in to our desires too quickly. We must wait, and stay tuned in, or we might miss the flame and fire that comes with a healing night of exaltation and destruction.
There were some marks of haste (I saw the first public broadcast), including some hair-and-wig infelicities and awkward camerawork. But generally speaking, here was Friel’s gorgeous play, both competently staged and beautifully spoken. It begins with Michael Sheen as the faith healer himself, Francis Hardy. (Sheen’s hair situation has reached Walt Whitman proportions — he’s about two more weeks of beard from going full Karl Marx.) He tells us a detailed and rueful accounting of his life on the road with his manager, Teddy, and his mistress, Grace. We later learn that Grace is actually his wife, calling attention to one of the many purposeless lies Hardy tells.
WhatsOnStage (4/5 stars)
“Occasionally it worked,” says Michael Sheen, in the title role, rolling the towns visited during his “vocation without a ministry” around his mouth in a rich incantation, walking through a backlit line of empty chairs. Sheen catches Frank’s charm, his performative creation of himself, his fabulist’s mingling of truth and lies where even he barely knows the distinction between the two.
The only negative review so far comes from Clive Davis from The Times, who gave 2 out of 5 stars:
Let’s start by accentuating the positive: you are not going to see a better performance in the rest of this benighted year than the one Michael Sheen gave in this live-streamed revival of Brian Friel’s play. There is a heart of darkness at the centre of the overlong and repetitive script, and Sheen, with his Old Testament beard and incandescent eyes, plunged into it.