Faith healer: A drama
by Brian Friel
Category: English drama

'The writing is beautiful, supple, rhythmical, charged with the slow, sure throb of despair and enchantment... Brian Friel is the most profound and poetic of contemporary Irish dramatists.' Observer Throughout the remote and forgotten corners of the British Isles, Frank Hardy offers the promise of redemption to the sick and the suffering. But his is an unreliable gift, a dangerous calling which brings him into conflict with his wife Grace and his manager Teddy. Their competing accounts of past events reveal the fragility of memory and the necessity of stories as a means of survival. Brian Friel's Faith Healer was first produced at the Longacre Theatre, New York, in April 1979 and was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in June 2016. 'The night of Faith Healer is one that still blazes in recollection for me, as religious experiences of art do. And it became a sort of touchstone for me in understanding not only Mr. Friel's work with a depth I hadn't appreciated before but also for defining the elusiveness of great art and the pain of the artist who creates it.' Ben Brantley, New York Times