The elusive Mr Hardy, Faith Healer

The editor was recently engaged in a Spring clean of her desk and came across the following piece, penned by the late Larry McCluskey from Cootehill. Larry, the former CEO of Monaghan VEC and the author of the Celt’s popular ‘Off the Fence’ column, passed away in March 2020. Here is an unpublished piece and photos that he submitted to the editor “for a quiet week” - an appreciation of one of Brian Friel’s finest plays ‘Faith Healer’...

Being an actor has many attractions, not least the occasional opportunity of playing a really interesting character on stage – and none come more interesting than Frank Hardy in Brian Friel’s mesmeric play, ‘Faith Healer’.

Forty years ago the honour of creating the role fell to veteran British film-actor, James Mason at the Longacre Theatre in New York. The show closed after just 20 performances, but that was far from the final verdict on ‘Faith Healer’ – it simply reflected New York’s preference for traditional or musical theatre over the monologue of FH.

In 1980 Donal McCann breathed volcanic fire into the FH role in Joe Dowling’s production at the Abbey Theatre, now regarded as the definitive interpretation of the part. I was privileged to see and marvel at McCann in the revival a few years later, and in the meantime I myself had the privilege – and challenge! – of playing Frank Hardy in an amateur production that reached the Athlone Finals 30 years ago.

The play involves three memorable characters – Frank, the Faith Healer; his wife, Grace, from a Northern Ireland legal background; and their Cockney manager-cum-roadie, Teddy.

Each tells the story of their shared van-journey through rural Wales and Scotland – but each with significant variations. Only once do they speak the exact same words – banal details of a final, fateful journey home to Ireland – from Stranraer to Larne, driving through the night to Donegal, where they find lodgings in a pub in the village of Ballybeg, the fictional location of Friel’s drama.

There are two other critical incidents. In the Welsh village of Llanblethian in Glamorganshire, all 10 clients in the old Methodist Hall are cured. And there is the stillbirth of a child at Kinlochbervie in Scotland. Teddy tells us Frank walked away, abandoning Grace at birth, but Grace tells us he said a few prayers at the infant’s graveside. Frank doesn’t speak of the birth at all. Frank’s gifts of healing are mercurial, uncertain, unbiddable. Many artists refer to this quality of their profession. Seamus Heaney published his earliest poems over the nametag, “Incertus”, Latin for uncertain – in fact, he said, “Incertus never left me”. John McGahern and John Banville both describe the writer as “always a beginner”; and Friel himself spoke of “the necessary uncertainty of the artist.”

‘Faith Healer’ operates on many levels. First, as a conflicting account of a shared journey. Then as a metaphor for the life and work of the artist the priest faced – at times tortured – by the uncertainty of their calling. And could the imperfect birth be symbolic of a political Anglo-Irish consummation of some kind? Frank is uncertain of the nature and source of his “healing gift” – was it all chance, or skill, or autosuggestion, self-healing? In Ancient Light, Banville’s actor-narrator, Alex Cleave comments: “How fragile is this absurd trade in which I have spent my life pretending to be other people, above all pretending not to be myself.”

Yet, the actor follows an old and proud tradition – s/he must create the role; not just say the lines, but inhabit them, infuse them with flesh and blood and spirit and experience, faithfully rendering through word, action, attitude and suggestion the intention of the playwright. At its zenith, theatre is the full realisation of the roles and their situations, as real and raw “as a freshly-peeled stick”, to use a Banville analogy; “Friel’s writing is so perfect that the language inspired the actor!” Was it any wonder Friel has such regard for actors? – describing the essential purpose of theatre (indeed of all art) as the fermentation in the mind of audiences long after the final curtain. Alex Cleave confesses to suffering “that fear that everyone in our trade is prone to – the simple, blank, insupportable fear of being found out”. All Frank knows for certain is when nothing is going to happen – for the rest, he never knows. And when the healing doesn’t work, he lashes out at Grace for her alleged disbelief in him. And then they would “tear each other apart” until the end, she says, “we came to recognise the neutrality of the ground between us”.

In Ballybeg, there’s a hooley in the pub – Grace sings “Believe me if all those endearing young charms”; Teddy gets drunk. Frank playfully straightens a crooked finger, only to be challenged to cure the local cripple. In the yard behind the pub, Frank faces McGarvey, knowing for certain he will fail – knowing, too, the awful price of that failure. Frank Hardy’s death is brutal – an axe, an iron bar, a pitchfork – yet there is a glorious, sacrificial, Christ-like quality to the death, a dreadful but foreseen, welcomed, final and fulfilling certainty at home in Ireland.

In all Friel’s plays, there is a redemptive quality – a crack that lets some light in: Gar’s father’s awkward affection when he tells his son to sit at the back of the plane, because in a crash the front gets the worst of it; Cass’s triumphant homecoming from America and reunion with her childhood lover, even if only imagined from the make believe chair; Molly Sweeney’s inner vision and acceptance restored, if not her eyesight; the Mundy sisters’ wild, liberating dance to assuage their longing. Emotional uplifts all – Friel’s empathy with his characters. Anguish, he told us, was as far as he could go, tragedy a step too far.

I was reminded of this recently when I read the epitaph on the playwright’s hillside tomb at Glenties – “I just want to put my arms around you and hold you close”.

‘Inverkeiting, Cawdor, Kirconnell, Plaidy, Kirkinner – Kinlochbervie.’

Indeed, yes!

* At the time of writing Aidan Gillen was due to reprise the role of Frank in ‘Faith Healer’ at the Abbey Theatre, which was postponed due to Covid.

To give Larry’s advice, when you next get the opportunity to see this “magnificent play”, take it!

It is a “real theatrical treat!”

RIP Larry.