Brian Friel's masterpiece Faith Healer is one of the finest plays written in the English language in the past 50 years and, for the Irish theatre at least, arguably the most influential, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Its delicate structure of four overlapping but conflicting monologues has been echoed in recent years by Conor McPherson, Mark O'Rowe and others. Yet, since its Irish premiere, directed by Joe Dowling at the Abbey in 1980 (after a disastrous Broadway opening), the play itself has been seen here far less often than its status would seem to merit.
The reason is as simple as it is paradoxical: Donal McCann's icily hypnotic performance in the title role of Francis Hardy was so terrifyingly, overwhelmingly potent that it has haunted the play like a ghost that no other actor would dare to exorcise.
There is thus a logic far beyond the demands of the Broadway run that is intended for Jonathan Kent's Gate production in the casting of Ralph Fiennes as Hardy.
Fiennes's touch of Hollywood glamour arms him for what turns out to be a gentle breaking of a long spell. McCann's performance will never be matched, and Fiennes is enough of an outsider not to feel the need to compete. He brings elegance and intelligence, rather than magic and mesmerism, to the role, and in the process he opens up the play again.
The other performances - Ingrid Craigie's as Franks's wife Grace and Ian McDiarmid as his manager Teddy - get more room to breathe. The text asserts its own prerogatives.
And what a text it is. Faith Healer is a pitch-perfect theatrical narrative that generates a gripping drama, not so much within a story as between stories. There is a Rashomon-like conflict between Frank's, Grace's and Teddy's versions of their travels through the scattered villages of Wales and Scotland, the birth of a still-born child and the final, doomed return to Ireland.
There are also layers of reality and allusion. This is the seedy story of an alcoholic charlatan, a meditation on the strangeness of love, a metaphorical exploration of the nature of art. It draws on the myth of Deirdre but also constitutes a kind of down-at-heel gospel with Frank as a cut-price Jesus who, when he cures 10 people and just one thanks him, echoes Luke's gospel with the question "What became of the other nine?".
The great pleasure of Kent's beautifully modulated production is its combination of graceful fluency with a willingness to allow all of these resonances to linger in the air. Fiennes contributes to this achievement by picking up above all on Frank's elusiveness and making a virtue of his own lack of an imposing presence by hinting at the character's virtual absence.
The effect of his thin frame and relative stillness is enhanced by Mark Henderson's lighting, which makes Fiennes even more shadowy and spectral, even more obviously a visitor from beyond the grave.
Fiennes's accent - a skilfully constructed neutral tone with an Irish voice lurking behind it - captures an exile's displacement. He uses the movie actor's technique of conveying internal emotions through small movements of his facial muscles, as if we are seeing him all the time in close-up.
He also deploys his most obvious weapon - his handsome features - in an admirably intelligent way, when he drops his jaw and twists his mouth to make himself ugly and the sudden shift gives Frank the variable, untrustworthy appearance of a changeling.
Fiennes's light touch allows Craigie and McDiarmid to occupy a larger share of the play's emotional space, and both respond with superb performances. Craigie bridles the fierce, dark emotion of Grace's story with the bitter self-mockery of a woman proud enough to loathe her own abasement.
McDiarmid's ripely fruity but astonishingly vivid Teddy bursts beyond the bounds of comic relief into a full-blown tragi-comedy in which his bathetic reminiscences of managing the career of a bag-piping whippet actually make his masochistic devotion to Frank and Grace all the more mysteriously moving.
What emerges from these mutually supportive performances is a wonderful clarity. The rich texture of Friel's writing is fully honoured, but it is also stripped down to the relentless rhythm of his beautifully-honed sentences.
Just as Frank is a kind of tormented priest, the play becomes a kind of tortured prayer, a ritual incantation accompanying a slow, grippingly inevitable, progress toward the ultimate consummation of death.
Until Mar 31
Dublin Bach Singers, St Anne's Church, Dublin
For this season's third concert in its ongoing survey of Bach's cantatas, the Orchestra of St Cecilia and its regular vocal soloists were joined by conductor Blánaid Murphy and her Dublin Bach Singers.
There was a ceremonial emphasis to the programme, with trumpets and timpani having plenty to do - and do well - in the early civic cantata, Gott ist mein König (God is my King, BWV 71), and the sumptuous wedding cantata, Dem Gerechten muß das Licht immer wieder aufgehen (Light dawns again and again for the righteous, BWV 195).
In the choral movements of both those works, the two-dozen-strong choir proved a fair match for the heavy instrumentation. If the outer voices tended to overshadow the inner ones, this was less problematic in the opening chorus of the more lightly scored Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten (Whoever allows God to hold sway, BWV 93).
Much of the vocal polyphony in BWV 71 and 195 fell to the soloists Lynda Lee (soprano), Alison Browner (contralto), Robin Tritschler (tenor) and Nigel Williams (bass). Though these voices seemed somehow to detract from rather than add to each other in the motet-like Dein Alter sei wie deine Jugend (May your old age be like your youth) from BWV 71, their notable equality of tone and power was particularly advantageous in the concertino passages of BWV 195.
Also in BWV 195, Williams's recitative and aria included some of the afternoon's most poetic solo singing, while the most fastidiously pointed accompaniment came from the strings in Tritschler's aria from BWV 93. Here, however, the general tendency to hold things back rather than drive them forward didn't make things easy for Tritschler. Steadiness, rather than sprightliness, was the order of the day. - Andrew Johnstone
