Review: Faith Healer

Faith Healer
Melbourne Theatre Company
9 March 2017
The Sumner
to 8 April
mtc.com.au

Paul Blackwell. Faith Healer. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Faith Healer, directed by Judy Davis, at Sydney’s Belvoir last year was so successful that the MTC put it into the Sumner Theatre. While twice as many can see it each night, most can’t experience the intimacy that made it so successful and the production struggles to find its strength in the large space.

Irish playwright Brian Friel’s play of four monologues only lasted for 20 performances on Broadway (with James Mason) in 1979 but has since gone on to scoff at those first reviews and opinions.

In the 1950s, Irish faith healer Francis “The Fantastic” Hardy (Colin Friels) travelled through Wales, Scotland and Ireland with his wife, maybe mistress, Grace (Alison Whyte), and manager-cum-dogsbody Teddy (Paul Blackwell). As their monologues coincide in time, the audience can imagine them together and find their own truths, which sit somewhere between comforting and devastating.

Moving from places including village halls, a desolate roadside, and a pub that’s more of a lounge bar, they remember more about death than healing. And their memories are shaped by the conscious and unconscious tweaks that create a story that can settle in their own psyches, no matter how broken or blackened, and help them make the only choices that feel right for them.

Friels holds his emotion tightly with a heavy physicality that makes Francis feel every movement as pain. Whyte leads with Grace’s heart and shares the emotion that lets us into her thoughts. Blackwell’s Teddy connects with the audience as he also sees the couple from an outsider’s perspective and because he survives by finding the awkward humour that offers much-needed space to breath and reflect.

But while they talk to us, we don’t know who “we” are. We’re not Francis’s “fictions” or “despairing people” wanting to be healed or to give up on hope. Are they talking to judge, jury, friends, strangers or gods? Are we listening to a confession or a yarn?

This is questioned more as most of the audience have little direct connection the stage. Brian Thomson’s design of an empty town hall engulfed by storm clouds (that subtly change colour and mood with Verity Hampson’s lighting) is clearly made for Belvoir. So much that ther’s a Belvoir-shaped thrust staged and a couple dozen of the luckiest punters get to sit on the extra seats around this stage. But while most of the audience were so close in Belvoir, I felt too distanced in the closest third of the seating bank.

If post-show chat is anything to go by, those close and centre had a much more engaging evening, but it left me watching performances and listening to words rather than being so lost in the memories of the characters that their pain was felt.

This was on AussieTheatre.comaussietheatre.com.

Review: Endgame

Endgame
MTC
26 March 2015
The Sumner
to 25 April
mtc.com.au

Julie Forsyth & Rhys McConnochie. Photo by Jeff Busby

There's a double page in the program for the MTC's Endgame titled "explantion". It's about modernism, Absurdism and finding meaning in Samuel Beckett's writing. It's great for post-show conversations but it doesn't talk about the possibility of losing yourself in Beckett's world and not giving a toss about meaning.

For me, the joy of a Beckett stage is being lost in a WTF time and space with people for whom this is every day. There's a rhythm – a music – to his writing that moves his audiences through the text without having to stop to understand and interpret. This rhythm is easy to see in a script and it's a loss to anyone who doesn't let it beat on the stage.

The Endgame world is described as "grey light". Here Clov (Luke Mullins), who can't sit, is servant to Hamm (Colin Friels), who can't walk or see, and spends every day in a chair in the centre of the space. To his right are two large cans or bins where Nagg (Rhys McConnochie) and Nell (Julie Forsyth), Hamm's parents who have no legs, live. They talk about death and endings while knowing that the inevitable release may be too far away to offer much hope.

But it's not bleak, and being free to laugh is what makes it light and fun.

The essential grey light is created by designer Callum Mortum and lighting designer Paul Jackson (and not forgetting Eugyeene Teh's costumes). There's a literal fourth wall of grey cement slabs that disappears in the opening of perfect black out (and may those who chose that moment to deal with their phones, get parking tickets before the week is out); there's nothing like velvet of pure dark to guide us into the unknown.

The bare world is a bunker made of concrete slabs, and, even as it asks questions and offers answers from future apocalypse to last century's wars, we never know why or how or when. The passing of a day is in the lighting that's only black and white. The changes are imperceptible until the grey is darker or a shadow has moved. As the night draws in, the stage looks like it's pulling away from the audience and could be turned off with the flick of a remote control.

Sam Strong directs a cast who know Beckett and, at their best, bring a complex understanding to their characters that lets the audience find that rhythm. Mullins and Forsyth especially find the humanity and loss in the subtext, while still letting Clov and Nell be clowns.

But there are moments of indulgence that makes it all about the actors. This breaks the rhythm and takes us back to looking for an explanation rather being happily lost in the pulse of grey light.

This was on AussieTheatre.com