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Faith Healer

Published Monday 9 November 2009 at 10:15 by Pat Ashworth

New Perspectives is touring Brian Friel’s hypnotic drama to village halls, and it’s right and proper to see this play about an itinerant faith healer in just the kind of place where such an entertainer would have operated. But it goes further than that, and in recreating a shabby hall and stage within that setting, makes us forget we are watchers at a play.

Rather, it draws us into close encounters - eye contact even - that are sometimes almost too painful to bear. The structure of four monologues makes extraordinary demands on the three actors, Martin Jenkins (Frank, the healer), Angela McGowan (Grace, his wife) and Stephen Ley (Teddy, the tour manager). Each responds magnificently to their turn to command the stage.

They tell the same story from their different perspectives of the 20-year relationship, a catalogue of remote place names charged with meaning. There’s something fanatical and disturbing about Jenkins’ Frank, a man who admits that his rare successes could have been down to chance, skill, illusion or delusion. The heart goes out to Grace, seconds away from a breakdown, it seems, in a beautifully controlled interpretation from McGowan.

Ley’s cockney character is the most delightful. He is familiar and intimate with his audience, a narrator who holds a story in suspense as he slowly fills and refills his glass. Tall tales of a bagpipe-playing whippet marry with accounts of tragic events that almost overcome himself and us. Respect for the acting profession grows every minute with such performances.

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