Pitlochry Festival
Theatre
Five stars
Truth is everything in
Brian Friel’s mighty play, which dissects the emotional debris left behind by
Francis Healey, a self-destructive faith healer who’s lost his mojo, but is so
addicted to life on the road he doesn’t know how to give it up. The various
truths are laid bare in a quartet of interlinked monologues, with litanies by Frank’s
wife Grace and manager Teddy book-ended by two from Frank.
From a deserted village
hall staple of Frank’s never-ending tour comes a series of show-boating
confessionals, showbiz anecdotes and unreliable memoirs that map out the rise and
fall of a life in personal and artistic decline. As Frank incants the names of
the small-town circuit like a prayer, the magic he’s attempting to conjure up
seems forever out of reach. But when it happens, however rarely, it is truly a
thing of wonder.
Elizabeth Newman’s
broodingly intense production sets out its store on Amanda Stoodley’s set,
which, lit by Jeanine Byrne, looks bathed in a sepia-tinted glow. With
slick-backed hair and weighed down by a shabby suit, George Costigan’s Frank attempts
to conjure up some alchemy while regaling us with his greatest hits. In his
still charismatic but fading, self-destructive pomp, he resembles an old-school
comedian past his best or late period Mark E Smith - another psychic lightning
rod.
Richard Standing’s Teddy
is an equally addicted shyster chasing the big-time, while Kirsty Stuart’s
Grace is perhaps the play’s most unsung tragedy, her face etched with a haunted
mix of devotion and disappointment. All
three in different ways are believers, chasing something more certain than the
transient life they thought would lead them to it, but who are now as damaged
as the old records of Ben Occhipinti’s sound design.
Friel’s play is revealed
as a melancholy and still-startling rumination on the erratic and occasionally
transcendent power of the latter-day gurus we call artists. In the hands of
Newman and her staggering cast it takes us further, until it resembles
something holy. It’s left to us to decide what’s real.
The Herald, October 28th 2019
Ends
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