When Brian Friel’s Faith Healer opened on Broadway in 1979, it closed, critically trashed, after 20 performances. The Irish playwright told an interviewer: “You feel as you do about a sickly child for a panned play.” But the script, 45 years on, is one of Friel’s most beloved offspring, regularly revived on both sides of the Atlantic.
In each successful production, though, you can see what daunted earlier audiences. Faith Healer has the austere form of four more-or-less half-hour monologues. The first and last are delivered by Frank Hardy, who tours Celtic villages in a van, laying hands on the sick. He travels with Grace, his (depending on who you believe) mistress or wife, and Teddy, his agent and driver.
