Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Brian Friel, directed by Gina Wilkinson
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
May 4-June 4, 2010
Faith Healer receives an ill-conceived production from Soulpepper that drains the play of its mystery. This 1979 masterpiece by Irish playwright Brian Friel, consisting of four half-hour-long monologues, is an intimate work and demands an intimate setting to be effective. Soulpepper’s first mistake is to present it in the Young Centre’s largest theatre space. Its second mistake is to hands the reins to a director who displays little sense of what the play is about.
The four monologues are in turn by Frank Hardy (Stuart Hughes), the itinerant Irish faith healer of the title, his companion Grace (Brenda Robins), Frank’s manager Teddy (Diego Matamoros) and finally again by Frank. All three tell tales of their years together climaxing with an event in Frank’s home town in Ireland, but their versions differ on several basic points. Is Grace Frank’s wife or mistress? Which one really chose the music for Frank’s healing sessions? Who really died--Frank’s mother or father? The differences are not merely due to a difference in perspective as in Rashomon, but to what aspects of reality the characters choose to accept. Thus, the play deals with both art and religion, with "the willing suspension of disbelief” Coleridge said is necessary to surrender to art and to the leap of faith necessary to accept the counterintuitive tenets of religion.
Gina Wilkinson’s direction emphasizes none of this. In fact, the show is so over-produced in terms of light and sound you would think it ends in an alien abduction. There is no need even for a set, since we don’t really know where the characters are. All we need is good story-telling. Of the three only Matamoros provides this in his hilarious portrait of a Cockney who thinks he is the brains of the bunch. Under Wilkinson’s direction, you would never know that Robins’s Grace is severely depressed. Worse, you would never know that Hughes’s Frank is facing a spiritual crisis, a fact essential to understanding the ending. Robins and Hughes are talented actors but Wilkinson has not directed them to bring out the subtext of what they say which often contradicts the words they speak. From Matamoros’s performance we can extrapolate an idea of how effective the whole play could be if Wilkinson had a less superficial understanding of it, but we should not have to do that. Anyone lucky or old enough to have seen Theatre Plus’s superb production of the play in 1991 should cherish their memories since Soulpepper has not surpassed it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-05-05.
Photo: Stuart Hughes. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2010-05-05
Faith Healer