In a week when developments in Ralph Fiennes’s personal life have hit news headlines, he deserves more welcome attention for his portrayal of Frank Hardy in this Broadway-bound production of Brian Friel’s 1979 play. Showing no signs of strain as the whiskey-soaked, tattily charismatic itinerant Irish faith healer of the title, Fiennes gives a performance of delicate control.
Three people in separate hells, yet bound together in a trinity of misery: watching Friel’s play, in Jonathan Kent’s fine staging, is like observing their lives through cracked glass. Faith Healer takes the form of four monologues, confessional and deceptive, tender and bitter, filled with cruel recriminations and memories distorted by time and self-delusion.
Grace is Frank’s wife, whose very identity has become subsumed into her fractured marriage so that no one — she, least of all — is quite sure who she is any more. Teddy, Frank’s manager, a Cockney refugee from the heyday of variety, has an ardent affection for the couple and a disciple’s unshakeable belief in Frank’s miraculous abilities.
Each of them offers a contradictory account of their travels through Scotland, Wales and back to Ireland, where Frank, whose words begin and end the play, relives the moment when the trio is torn apart at last. Faith — in love, God, family or home — seems unsustainable.
By offsetting Teddy’s romanticised view of the Celtic temperament with the shocking fate that Frank eventually suffers at his countrymen’s hands, Friel’s vision of Irishness combines sentiment with frustration and violence. A deep seam of despair runs through the writing, mined to dark and beautiful effect by Kent.
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Fiennes’s Frank is deadened by disappointment; the metallic flatness of his voice almost verges on the monotonous, until it sparks into life as he expresses his rage at his predicament or his hatred of his wife’s hopeless, helpless loyalty to him. Ingrid Craigie’s Grace is a trembling wreck, her shattered existence the price she pays for refusing to renounce her belief in Frank. She’s also strikingly sensual, rolling the recollection of their love-making around her mouth with a relish tinged with shame.
And as Teddy, Ian McDiarmid, revisiting a role that won him accolades at London’s Almeida in 2001, is staggeringly good. With his bandy legs and showbiz bravura, he switches with mercurial alacrity from affability to agony, his eyes brimming with tears as he contemplates the mutual savagery of Frank and Grace’s relationship — and the loneliness of his own exclusion from it. Entirely involving, exquisitely sad.
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