Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Friel good factor

Plus: Bugsy Malone, currently receiving a terrific performance at the Lyric Hammersmith, is a glorious absurdity with a sweet logic all its own

Does anyone believe Brian Friel’s libellous blarney? He portrays Ireland in the 20th century as an economic basket case where the starving, the retarded, the crippled and the widowed offer up prayers to a heartless God who responds by heaping their burden ever higher. Friel is popular with British mainlanders who are tickled by the news that their Atlantic coastlines are peopled by picturesque barbarians and suicidal drunkards mired in exquisitely revolting dereliction. You’ll notice that aid agencies use the same technique, and for the same audience, when they portray Africa as a rough and ready paradise where life is organised around the latest borehole dug by a team of gap year Norwegian pole vault champions.

Friel’s play Faith Healer, set in the 1950s, presents us with a charlatan from Limerick who peddles his brand of magic to deathbed cripples in Ireland, Wales and Scotland (but not England, of course, where the wholesome and rational people have no need of witchcraft). The healer, played by charming oddball Stephen Dillane, fancies himself as a psychologist and suggests that his followers have no wish be cured, only to be confirmed in their hopelessness. Yet his cynicism doesn’t quite square with the pride he takes in his occasional triumphs. His greatest success occurred in a Glamorganshire hamlet where no fewer than 11 dribbling, stone blind, deaf mute hunchbacks in wheelchairs were healed by a casual wave of his hand and went on to form a first class cricket team that defeated Sri Lanka in an exhibition match at Lord’s.

The healer quits the stage halfway through his story having hinted at a late night lynching in a Donegal pub. Enter his wife (Gina McKee), who suggests that her husband was an abusive crook addicted to whisky and falsehood.

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