In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 3 8 11 Faith Healer in New York and Dublin n i c h o l a s g r e n e Faith Healer was revived by the Gate Theater in Dublin in 2006. After a sell-out run of six weeks in Dublin, it transferred to Broadway where, in spite of somewhat mixed reviews, it won a Tony nomination for Ralph Fiennes as leading actor and a Tony award for Ian McDiarmid as best featured actor. The box office was sufficiently strong to warrant an extension to the fifteen-week run originally planned. This Broadway success in 2006 makes it the more interesting to look at the play’s original production, because Faith Healer is unusual among Brian Friel’s plays in having opened on Broadway and unique in opening with a non-Irish director and an international cast. It flopped in New York in 1979, in spite of having James Mason in the lead, but when revived at the Abbey in 1980 it became one of the landmark productions of its time, helping to confirm Donal McCann’s reputation as one of Ireland’s great actors. Why did it fail on Broadway, why did it succeed in Dublin? Were there significant differences between its reception in one venue and the other? These questions, however, are underpinned by other issues having to do with the origins of the play and how it came to be produced on Broadway in the first place, issues that relate also to the 2006 revival. To study Faith Healer in New York and Dublin is to be brought up against the marketplace facts of theatrical production as well as the broader matter of how we construct theatrical history. The play Faith Healer as we know it had a quite extended pre-history. In October 1975, Brian Friel sent to his London agent Warren Brown the text of a one-act monologue called Faith Healer.1 It was a project he had been working on since back in April of the year, deeply uncertain about what form it would take, experimenting with all sorts of different modes of action and Faith Healer in New York and Dublin | 139 narration, including the intercutting of film or still images. The only things that had remained constant were the story of the faith healer, his involvement with his wife/mistress Grace, his manager Teddy, and the ending in his violent death in Ballybeg. It was not until a very late stage that Friel decided to confine it to a single monologue by Frank, a monologue substantially like the final text except that he tells out the story to its very end. Warren Brown wrote back expressing doubt about finding a commercial venue for a one-act play, and probably for that reason we find Friel in March of 1976 negotiating for a production at the Queen’s University Festival.2 What was being planned was a fully professional production—they were talking of leading actors and directors—but on the reduced scale and modest budget of a university arts festival. Then, unexpectedly in September, very close to the date of the projected production—the QUB Festival was to take place in November—Friel sent along a second monologue, called “Faith Healer’s Wife,” to be played as a companion piece. He even suggested Billie Whitelaw for the part of Grace.3 Once again, this monologue was quite close to Grace’s speech in the final play, though Kinlochbervie was not yet the crucial location it was to become. Michael Barnes, the festival director, was naturally delighted. But he must have been surprised to receive, weeks later, yet a third script, this one called “The Game,” to be played with the other two. “The Game,” which has never been published, is a two-hander about an unsuccessful alcoholic commercial artist and his wife who work out the peculiar dynamics of their marriage by a game in which they lock eyes and the loser is the first to look away.4 Friel proposed the three one-acts should be billed as “Bannermen”: the Faith Healer’s banner advertising the Fantastic Frank Hardy was to be echoed in the vulgar posters that the Omagh artist Noel has to paint for a living at the start of “The Game.” Obviously, “The Game” was to provide parts and interaction for the two performers of the Frank and Grace monologues. “Bannermen” did not get produced at the...

Share