Searching for the faith

Faith Healer is dominated by a riveting performance by a Hollywood star – but it isn't Ralph Fiennes.
Colin Murphy reports

The Faith Healer is on stage, and we have come to worship. He smiles wryly, and we laugh. He pauses, and we laugh. He raises his hand, and we fall silent. We seek theatrical epiphany. But miracles are not predictable.

For much of his opening monologue as the title character in Brian Friel's 1979 play, Ralph Fiennes is awarded reverential respect by the audience, and he repays it with a performance that is minutely calibrated, commanding and cold.

Fiennes's mastery of his craft is immediately evident. He can take in the expanse of the theatre in a raised eyebrow, and instil tension in a flick of his wrist. His diction is impeccable, his phrasing exact, his tone commanding. Yet as the Fantastic Frank Hardy, the Faith Healer, he lacks something: perhaps it is faith.

Faith Healer is a many-layered, subtle, occasionally opaque drama. It tells the story of the Faith Healer and his two-man retinue, his Irish wife and his Cockney manager. Together, they tour their mini-circus, of the laying on of hands and supposed miracle cures, across Wales and Scotland and, eventually, home to Ireland.

Occasionally, the fantastic Frank Hardy does indeed cure; more often he drinks his way through failed performances, reinventing himself at each stop with banal lies about his background. He is a faith healer, but he lacks faith. "Was it all chance? – or skill? – or illusion? – or delusion?... Could my healing be effected without faith? But faith in what? – in me? – in the possibility? – faith in faith?" he asks, tormenting himself.

Each of the three characters tells the story of their travels in turn, each embroidered differently, each contradicting the other in small details but, between them, building a layered and subtle picture of their lives together.

Ralph Fiennes, initially at least, plays Frank Hardy as a man delivering a carefully-rehearsed performance. There is no sense of spontaneity, and he plays Hardy with a forceful charisma that appears to belie the darkness and vulnerability of the character. And then a mobile phone in the audience rings, brief and jarring. It seems as if this is the trigger that Fiennes needs, the edge of discontent and wariness in his audience that, as Frank Hardy, he must still.

And still it he does. As Hardy retells the exploits of his homecoming night in Ireland, when he cures a man's injured finger in a pub in Donegal, and is suddenly confronted with a man in a wheelchair seeking a cure, Ralph Fiennes conveys for the first time some measure of the mystery in the man, some measure of the central paradox of this play – that amidst the barren scepticism of Frank Hardy's character (a scepticism that is enshrined in the structure of the play), there is a messianic gift.

Then Ingrid Craigie, as Frank Hardy's wife Grace, is onstage. Craigie plays the straight woman of the piece; her emotional intensity is a counterpoint to the detached, almost ironic, demeanour of Frank Hardy. Though Craigie is a skilled actor, she too struggles to find any spontaneity in her monologue and, without recourse to the humour that occasionally lights up Frank Hardy, it is intense and strained.

Ian McDiarmid, known to a cult following as the Emperor from the Star Wars movies, follows, as the Faith Healer's Cockney manager, Teddy. McDiarmid is wonderful: he alone manages to instil his character with both absolute authenticity and dramatic momentum. He milks the comedy in Friel's script – where Ralph Fiennes seems in thrall to the elegant preciseness of the writing, McDiarmid infuses it with spontaneity and an apparent, beguiling fecklessness.

And though his character, Teddy, is both most foreign (the lone Englishman in the Irish play) and most obviously fraudulent (he tells some ridiculous, though funny, tales of his exploits as a promoter), he is also the most likeable and engaging – as both Frank and Grace Hardy appear to set themselves on course for tragedy, Teddy recounts it all with a wry but affectionate tone, a chorus mediating the action for us.

By the time Fiennes returns for the final monologue, the groundwork has been laid. Brian Friel's luxuriant prose, the intrigues of the script, initially confusing but now compelling and, in particular, the charming and utterly convincing performance of McDiarmid, have created a stage on which Fiennes can work some of his own magic. This time, his performance seems more natural, more convinced, less aware of both himself and the audience. The audience seems no longer reverent, but simply expectant.

Brian Friel sends Frank Hardy, the Faith Healer, on a journey of self-discovery: he has "a sense of homecoming"; he reaches a point at the end where, "for the first time there was no atrophying terror. And the maddening questions were silent." The route Hardy takes on this homecoming, and the nature it ultimately takes, are part of the layered philosophical teasing of the play: Friel is asking us what we believe in – truth, family, art, religion, faith itself? – and refuses to clarify the answers. (It is not even clear from where Frank Hardy is speaking to us throughout, or why.) But it is as his character find his own answers that Fiennes comes to command the stage. For a long time towards the end, he simply stands deep at the back of the stage, still, talking gently. It is beautiful and, unlike earlier in the production, it is not cold. Still, there is something lacking, a vulnerability perhaps.

Amidst all the petty lies, embroidered exploits and simple misremembering that characterise the play, there are two core incidents in the story that are confirmed by all three characters, when Frank Hardy undeniably cured people of afflictions. (Since one of these, in a Welsh village, Hardy has carried around a newspaper cutting reporting it, as if to assure himself it was true, and that he was who he said he was: Hardy is both Messiah and his own Doubting Thomas.) This is the crux of Faith Healer – the possibility of faith in a world of scepticism, of desperation, of ugliness, of disbelief and, ultimately, of violence.

Frank Hardy himself may be a metaphor for the church, for the possibility of faith and miracles amidst the sordidness and failures that have afflicted our institutions and clergy. Or he may be a metaphor for the artist, seeking to provoke enlightenment but, more often than not, failing, before finally facing down the baying crowd. Hardy appears to bestride a schism, a schism between medieval and modern civilisations. His tours amongst the afflicted of the rural villages of Wales and Scotland bare no obvious connection to the modern world, yet the scepticism and pragmatism that dominate his thinking, that provoke the "maddening questions", are products of an Enlightenment mind. Somewhere in his core is a mystery that neither we nor he can understand, but it is a mystery that Fiennes, though commanding, does not bring us closer to. Ralph Fiennes imposes himself impressively on the role of Frank Hardy, but the niggling doubt remains: does he have the faith?

?More Faith Healer continues at the Gate Theatre, Cavandish Row until 1 April. All performances are sold out, but for the chance to pick up cancellation tickets, call the box office on 01 874 4045. www.gate-theatre.ie