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Faith Healer

Faith Healer

★★★

Cambridge Arts Theatre

FAITH HEALER at the Cambridge Arts Theatre

★★★

Faith Healer

“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.


FAITH HEALER at the Cambridge Arts Theatre

Reviewed on 31st October 2023

by Phillip Money

Photography by Sheila Burnett

 

 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

 

A Voyage Around My Father | ★★★ | October 2023
Frankenstein | ★★★★ | October 2023
The Shawshank Redemption | ★★★ | March 2023
The Homecoming | ★★★★★ | April 2022
Animal Farm | ★★★★ | February 2022
Aladdin | ★★★★ | December 2021
The Good Life | ★★ | November 2021
Dial M For Murder | ★★★ | October 2021
Absurd Person Singular | ★★★ | September 2021
Tell me on a Sunday | ★★★ | September 2021

Faith Healer

Faith Healer

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Absurd Person Singular

Absurd Person Singular

★★★

Cambridge Arts Theatre | UK Tour

Absurd Person Singular

Absurd Person Singular

Cambridge Arts Theatre

Reviewed – 7th September 2021

★★★

 

“As the comedy takes a darker turn, Helen Keeley gives the performance of the night”

 

Alan Ayckbourn’s classic comedy is fast approaching its fiftieth anniversary and in this touring production by London Classic Theatre, directed by Michael Cabot, it is aging well.

Three acts are set in three different kitchens on three consecutive 1970s Christmas Eves – enigmatically described as last year, this year, and next year – and in Simon Scullion’s clever set design we see the necessary changes in windows, doors, and decor to distinguish the three different households.

The first kitchen we see is in the home of Jane and Sidney Hopcroft. Sidney (Paul Sandys) is an up-and-coming businessman using a party to further his relationship with bank manager Ronald Brewster-Wright (Graham O’Mara) and established architect Geoffrey Jackson (John Dorney). Sidney’s wife Jane (Felicity Houlbrooke) has cleaned their home to a spotless condition but is nervous of doing anything that could be conceived embarrassing. With frantic energy the couple go through their party preparations, their frenzied activity reminiscent of many a TV sitcom.

Ayckbourn is a master of placing central events offstage so that we have a sense of being behind the scenes. Here, the party is in full swing in the living room, behind the kitchen door, so an entrance on stage is an exit from the party. Full marks to Sound Designer Chris Drohan for the convincing snatches of offstage conversation and laughter, and the excellent effect of heavy rain falling in the garden. Courageous direction reinforces this action elsewhere by leaving the stage empty and the audience waiting for something to happen, perhaps on some occasions for too long.

Eventually, all the guests appear in the kitchen – except, amusingly, the lively Dick and Lottie Potter who are only ever talked about and never appear. One laddish conversation between the three men with near-misogynistic attitudes helps us understand an element of Geoffrey’s womanising nature but otherwise, in our age of #MeToo, feels inappropriate rather than comedic.

We are also introduced in this scene to Marion Brewster-Wright (Rosanna Miles) who shows excellent changes in vocal quality from a highly exuberant party voice to a low threatening growl when admonishing her husband; and Eva Jackson (Helen Keeley) who is the first character to hint at something more serious than the shallow party talk of the other two couples.

Act Two moves into the Dorney’s more well-appointed apartment kitchen. As the comedy takes a darker turn, Helen Keeley gives the performance of the night, expressing her inner turmoil and scribbling desperate notes, without speaking a word. Around her, the others continue their antics oblivious to her plight and the company induces our laughter despite Eva’s pain.

The final kitchen is in the home of the Brewster-Wrights, the largest residence of our three couples, but there has clearly been a downturn in their luck and with that of Geoff Dorney whose only hope for future success appears to lie with Sydney. When the Hopcrofts arrive unannounced, we see that it is Sydney alone who has had a successful year, but for the other two couples he will always be the little man.

An Ayckbourn trait is that his stories, snapshots of imagined lives, never really end. And so the curtain falls on the rising Sidney leading the others in a not-so-merry dance. Whilst we laugh.

 

 

Reviewed by Phillip Money

Photography by Sheila Burnett

 


Absurd Person Singular

Cambridge Arts Theatre until 11th September then UK Tour continues

 

Previously reviewed at this venue this year:
Copenhagen | ★★★★ | July 2021

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