FAITH HEALER at the Cambridge Arts Theatre

★★★

“Paul Carroll in the title role – framing the whole and holding the play together – is excellent”

London Classic Theatre presents a revival, forty-plus years on, of Brien Friel’s well thought of play directed by Michael Cabot. Recognised by some as one of the great contemporary plays, it’s a curious piece made up of four monologues given by three characters. With no linear action to follow, the audience must piece together an understanding of what has gone before from the recollections of the three characters. Recollections that are often shady, with memories unreliable, events half-forgotten or deliberately reframed over time.

The Faith Healer of the title is Frank (Paul Carroll) – a man with a gift, or a mountebank depending on your interpretation. With his wife/mistress Grace (Gina Costigan) and Manager Teddy (Jonathan Ashley), the three of them have travelled for years across Wales and Scotland from village to village. A battered banner is displayed “The Fantastic Frank Hardy – for One Night Only”. The loudest laugh of the evening is that an earlier tagline describing Frank as “the seventh son of a seventh son” was revised because it made the poster too expensive.

A giant mirror at the rear of the stage is tilted down to reflect the floor upon which the characters pace (Set & Costume Designer Bek Palmer). Three large stone paving slabs surrounded by shingle represent the distorted shapes of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Frank reminisces. The two other characters sit at the side of the stage, listening in. We wonder later how this can be possible so perhaps they exist here just in Frank’s memory. He points and gesticulates, picking out members of the audience – just as Frank the Faith Healer might have done in his shows of yesteryear. He is dressed respectably in a three-piece suit and trilby, that perhaps has seen better days.

Grace rises, dressed in a drab brown frock and cardigan, and takes her turn. Gina Costigan is amusingly skittish in her movements, but her vocal delivery is sometimes unclear. As she pauses midsentence and breaks the flow, the speech loses direction. With a seeming lack of emotion in describing some heartfelt things, she sadly fails to hold our attention. What we do learn though is that much of what we have heard so far might not be as straightforward as we thought.

The third monologue is from the debonair Teddy. Providing a splash of colour in his smoking jacket, yellow waistcoat and red bowtie, Jonathan Ashley confidently prowls the stage like a stand-up comedian regaling the audience of his stories of past glories. [Shades of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, here]

Brien Friel gives us four excellent examples of an unreliable narrator, more often found in the written word rather than the spoken, and the audience must draw their own conclusions as to what has really happened. But the production is uneven, three out of the four monologues are overlong, and all three actors are guilty of making unnecessary restless movements. Paul Carroll in the title role – framing the whole and holding the play together – is excellent. He commands the stage. His lilting brogue, rich in quality, rises from a near whisper to a booming baritone and has us holding on to every word.