How we get by in the world is an act of faith – we take the words of others on trust. Brian Friel’s masterpiece, Faith Healer, was first performed in 1979, during a violent period in Northern Ireland, and is in part a study of what happens when one person’s narrative undermines another’s and the truth slides out of view. Who to believe? And what anyway can faith accomplish? There is even the bleak possibility that living itself might prove, in some ways, to be a confidence trick. It is wonderful, in Rachel O’Riordan’s attentive, level and serious-minded production, to be reminded of the sheer nerve and brilliance of Friel’s monologues from three actors who are never together on stage (unlike the rapid to and fro of much contemporary drama), and to experience, through their varying versions of the truth, a distorted deja vu.
Does Frank Hardy, touring remote corners of Wales and Scotland performing miracle cures, have a gift or is he a fraud? It’s a question he asks himself. Declan Conlon plays him convincingly (and yes, the word has weight in context) wearing a shabby black suit, a stab at respectability that is not quite respectable enough. And Conlon, you can see, respects his character, seems to wish to give him the benefit of the doubt, to be his defender. He does not convey the charisma (the “special magnificence”) nor the cruelty that Grace, his wife, describes – but then, how far are we to trust her account of him?
