A BELVOIR PRODUCTION PRESENTED BY STATE THEATRE COMPANY.
By Brian Friel
The Fantastic Francis Hardy: charming charlatan and showman or intermittently-gifted miracle worker?
Accompanied by his wife (or maybe mistress) Grace, and ex-vaudevillian manager Teddy, Francis travels the fading towns of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, scratching out a living curing the ill, strengthening the weak and liberating the doomed of their hope.
Wrestling with faith, memory and truth, Faith Healer is a story of the ties that bind us together, sometimes to our detriment.
The career defining masterpiece of the incomparable Irish great Brian Friel (Dancing at Lughnasa, Translations) the play sings with wit and tragedy as Francis, Grace and Teddy’s versions of their shared history slowly intertwine. Faith Healer comes to Adelaide in a highly awarded, hit production from director Judy Davis starring the exceptional Colin Friels, Alison Whyte and Paul Blackwell.
Join us for a mesmerising night in the theatre. You might just leave a believer.
Duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes (including 20 minute interval)
“We meet the characters later, isolated, haunted by anguished memories, searching for reconciliation with the past, for an understanding of the lives they once shared and who or what they might be. But the characters’ control over their lives is fragile.”
The legendary artists reflects on the legacy of the playwright and the power of Faith Healer before it hits the Adelaide stage.
When Artistic Director Geordie Brookman briefed us about Faith Healer, his description of the show contained a lot of … pauses. Almost as if the words were on the tip of his tongue but he couldn’t quite form them. Like some unknowable force kept tripping him up. It turns out that force was Faith Healer… Here, we try to get to the heart of its power.
We explore the mysterious, unsettling power of Friel’s greatest play through the lens of literature’s obsession with the unreliable narrator.
Faith Healer takes place in a world painted entirely in muddy shades of grey; a world where truth and reality are movable, fluid. They shift and change form depending on who is telling the story, who is recounting events, and what their agenda is. Truth is constructed entirely through memory. As a result it becomes fallible.
Here we collect some modern day faith healers (in the tradition of Friel) who have allegedly fiddled with the truth to present a reality that suited them, and the identity they were creating for themselves.
David Grant quite literally wrote the book on Brian Friel. Here, we chat about the work of the legendary playwright and place Faith Healer in the context of his other work.
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