Brilliantly performed twaddle: Old Vic’s Faith Healer reviewed

The Old Vic refuses to reopen. Director Matthew Warchus says the social distancing rules make it impossible for him to reach the 70 per cent capacity he needs to break even. That was true in the old days when the Vic had to put on lavish fare and tempt audiences away from the opulent variety of the West End. But the competition has gone. Warchus is free to mount cheap, simple dramas which recoup their costs quickly. Curiously, this is what he’s doing with Brian Friel’s three-hander, Faith Healer, but the show is performed in an empty house and watched live by spectators via Zoom. The pandemic has made Warchus allergic to playgoers. What a shame. When Lilian Baylis ran the Vic during the Great War she kept it open even when Zeppelins were bombing London. ‘What’s an air-raid,’ she famously boasted, ‘when my curtain’s up?’

Faith Healer, written in 1980, is set during the pinched post-war years when disease and physical deformity were commoner than they are now. We meet Francis Hardy, a Limerick charlatan, who cures the sick in failing towns on the coastal fringes of Scotland and Wales. He’s a grotesque human specimen, an alcoholic fantasist, who has wasted his talent on a dead-end career and who takes out his frustrations on his sad, needy wife. He travels with a sidekick from London, Teddy, who promotes the show and drives the van.

The whole thing is hokum, of course, but Friel is good at conjuring an atmosphere of rural squalor and spiritual decay. ‘As soon as darkness fell, a few would begin to sidle in,’ says Hardy of his audiences who rarely number more than a dozen. The sick are not there to be healed, he admits, but wanted ‘confirmation that they were incurable’.