Faith Healer Reviews

Poor Ian McDiarmid. A brilliant actor who will forever be bridled with "best known as Emperor Palpatine." I just hope no one shows up just to make him sign a lightsaber or something equally idiotic.

Between him and Richard Griffiths, this could be the season of lesser-known actors whom I've liked for years finally getting their much-deserved recognition in the U.S.

Updated On: 5/4/06 at 05:36 PM

The toast given by the Best Man at the wedding was oddly lugubrious.


It means "mournful". Try "lachrymose" and see where it gets you!

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So don't post.

Better?

I love Margo also -- she sets a high standard. But, I think others can be helpful as well. Perhaps Margo is indisposed just now.
EDIT: Oh darn it! And I knew that in the back of my mind but I'm just too damn literal!

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Updated On: 5/4/06 at 05:52 PM

Don't you want to read them for yourself and make up your own mind?

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I'm not belittling you, I'm asking a legitimate question regarding the posting style of a review thread.

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I can't believe that someone is being belittled for posting Broadway information on a Broadway message board.

Years ago, I saw him 4 times in 'The Black Prince'! The man is a legend, and the work he did in resuscitating The Almeida Theatre deserves much greater recognition. Unquestionably he should be Sir Ian!

The NY Times is a Rave:

"HE is certainly in love with himself, isn't he, this middle-aged rake with the time-shined suit and the gaunt, unshaven face. Or is it that he holds himself in even more contempt than he does the rest of the world? Either way, the narcissism is overwhelming. And despite yourself, you can't take your eyes off him, because the power behind the pose is so genuine that it hurts.

Playing the title role in Brian Friel's great play "Faith Healer," which opened last night in a mesmerizing revival at the Booth Theater, Ralph Fiennes paints a portrait of the artist as dreamer and destroyer that feels both as old as folklore and so fresh that it might be painted in wet blood. The self-lacerating vanity that has always been central to Mr. Fiennes's presence as a film actor ("The Constant Gardener," "The English Patient") has rarely been to put to such powerful use.

This shrewd channeling of his glamorously peevish star shine may finally get "Faith Healer," a production from the Gate Theater of Dublin, directed with poetic starkness by Jonathan Kent, the New York audience it deserves. First (and last) seen on Broadway in 1979 for a mere 20 performances with James Mason as its star, "Faith Healer" is a dense and lyrical series of monologues, a form little loved by action-hungry American theatergoers.

Yet anyone who starts listening, with full attention, to the words — and, just as important, the silences — of the three characters who tell their horrible, fantastic and oddly familiar story should be fatally hooked. Intricate and self-contradicting, the narrative has the addictive pull of a detective yarn, a cosmic version in which the clues do and do not add up to a clear solution. And in Mr. Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid this production has storytellers who know how to hold a stage unconditionally, even when, in Ms. Jones's case, the performer doesn't entirely match the part.
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Mr. Friel leaves the answers in shadow. But the pain that emerges from these conflicting accounts is as hard and lucid as crystal. You come to realize that the distortions and lies — if that's what they are — are an anesthetic that allows these people to tell their stories, as is often the case with personal myths. But as Mr. Fiennes, Ms. Jones and Mr. McDiarmid demonstrate so powerfully, such evasions can keep anger, closely followed by anguish, at bay only for so long.
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If there is a weak link, as impossible as this sounds, it is Ms. Jones, the remarkable American actress who won a Tony Award last year for "Doubt." It's not just that her Anglo-Irish accent is uncertain. She is too palpably strong as a woman who sees her very identity erased by the man she loves. But Ms. Jones's fierce, artful balance between resentment and agony, between disgust and wonder, is beautifully sustained in ways that finally enhance the play's emotional patterns.

Mr. McDiarmid, a stalwart of the London stage, is beyond reproach. With his blatantly dyed orange hair and shabby showman's attire, his Teddy registers at first as a pathetic joke, a seedy old vaudevillian with a repertory of showbiz anecdotes about earlier acts he managed, like the whippet that played the bagpipes. But this jocularity is a shield that slips. And when his narrative strays into descriptions of humiliation and loss, the hurt breaks through the bravado like a fist through papier-mâché.

In like manner Mr. Fiennes plays up the showman in Frank. There are vestiges here of Laurence Olivier as the decaying music hall performer in John Osborne's "Entertainer," conveying the same mixed urges to ingratiate and alienate. But beyond the contempt and charm is an awareness of imponderable darkness within. You sense it when he speaks of foreseeing the play's climactic event and opens his mouth into a maw that becomes a black hole.
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The tragedy for the characters in "Faith Healer" is that while connection among them is elusive, the memory of fleeting contact remains and scalds. That the same might be said of the play's effect upon us is, more than anything, what makes "Faith Healer" a major work of art."

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/05/05/theater/reviews/05heal.html?pagewanted=all

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The Times as usual overrates a play.

To wit:

1. great acting from the men
2. Cherry: is fine except her accent is uneven. I think her character says she was educated in the States [hence the lack of a consistent Irish accent]. If not then it is her fault for not attending to this [and she has an accent coach].
3. the play is a wordy bore. At almost 3 hours, it is talk, talk, talk in a pretentious manner that saps away all the tension and empathy you might feel.

It is though 1,000 better than WELL which plays like a Lifetime movie sans Meredith Baxter.

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Talkin Broadway is Positive:

"Brian Friel's Faith Healer is dedicated to the proposition that the least reliable interpreters of history are those who actually witness it. Any number of interpretations are provided of the trials and triumphs surrounding the traveling trio at the play's center, but which - if any - can be believed is the most confounding conundrum.

Nonetheless, thorough distrust is rarely as invigorating as in the Gate Theatre Dublin production of the play, which has just opened at the Booth. Buoyed by world-class actors and probing direction from Jonathan Kent, this mounting doesn't shy away from the dark shadows cast by the questions from which the play is constructed. But nor does it deny you the thrill of feeling that somewhere, buried beneath mountains of ambiguity, the answers are waiting to be discovered.
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Kent's production - despite being designed with an unnecessary oppressiveness by Jonathan Fensom, though it's superbly lit by Mark Henderson - reveals this as yet one more convenient inaccuracy. Faith Healer doesn't provide the depth of emotional affirmation that Friel's other plays, like Dancing at Lughnasa or Philadelphia, Here I Come!, do, but it offers more intellectual and haunting pleasures that prove no less resonant after leaving the theater.

Despite operating individually, Fiennes, Jones, and McDiarmid create complex interlocking relationships that form an ironclad family among these disagreement-prone people. This is exactly as it should be, as each is structurally vital: Fiennes's matter-of-fact delivery of his first monologue provides a strong foundation for the evening; Jones, with her subtly aching soulfulness, and McDiarmid, with cockney-tinged confidence, then take turns refuting some segments and reinforcing others.
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It's a part of them all, and yet separate - something everyone knows, but something no one can know for sure. This Faith Healer, however, makes attempting to divine what really happened the most engrossing mystery of the year.
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/FaithHealer.html

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