Got faith?
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.