Three Characters in Search of a Play: Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and the Quest for Final Form

Abstract

Three Characters in Search of a Play: Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and the Quest for Final Form Claire Gleitman The success in both Dublin and New York of the 2006 revival of Faith Healer— featuring Ralph Fiennes in the title role—might seem to put to rest at long last the critical dispute about whether Brian Friel’s 1979 drama can be called “dramatic.” That question has been raised by numerous commentators in the twenty-seven years since the play first opened, and closed twenty performances later, on Broadway.1 To be sure, the 2006 Fiennes revival did have its detractors, including a reviewer who wished that Friel had allowed his characters “to interact in a traditional play” so that their “long-winded digressions would not have taken place”— which is a little like wishing that Shakespeare had written Hamlet without all those soporific soliloquies.2 But most critics by now seem to accept that Friel’s “dense and lyrical series of monologues”3 does constitute a play, and a theatrically gripping one at that, even though its three characters never interact with one another nor share the stage with anyone other than their lonely, fractured selves. Faith Healer’s lack of an overarching dramatic structure is not a critical red herring, at least not for the characters themselves, all of whom express a plaintive longing for the contentment that they imagine certainty, stillness, completion—in short, form—might bring. At the heart of Faith Healer is the same “tragic conflict” that Pirandello speaks of in his famous Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei Personaggi in Cerca d’autore): the conflict, that is, “between life (which is always moving and changing) and form (which fixes it, immutable).”4 [End Page 95] Friel’s abiding interest in Pirandello’s drama has been remarked upon frequently; Friel himself noted that he was “praying to Pirandello” when he wrote The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), and Living Quarters (1977) is so heavily indebted to Six Characters as to feel slightly derivative.5 In Faith Healer, by contrast, Pirandello’s aesthetic preoccupations have seeped beneath Friel’s skin and the dramatic fruit they bear is uniquely the younger playwright’s own. Like Pirandello’s forsaken family, the characters in Faith Healer are deprived by their creator of the objective container, the “traditional play” that might stabilize and verify their existence. This deprivation manifests itself differently in each play, for the crucial reason that Pirandello’s characters recognize themselves as characters—that is, as works of art. Hence, they are horrified by their fixedness, as distinguished from the living actors’ fluidity: Our reality doesn’t change: it can’t change! It can’t be other than what it is, because it is already fixed for ever. It’s terrible. Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder .. . if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow ... who knows how? (NM 266) By contrast, Friel’s characters perceive themselves, at least for a time, as “real.” The focus of their frustration is that very transitoriness to which Pirandello’s Father refers, which renders to “real life” the feeling of something illusory, chaotic and untrustworthy, fundamentally subjective and impossible to confirm. By rendering the action of Faith Healer through discrete monologues, Friel underlines the isolation of his characters, who need one another desperately but remain encased within their separate and irreconcilable subjectivities. At the play’s center is Francis Hardy, an itinerant faith healer who spent years plying his precarious trade in the company of his stalwart Cockney manager, Teddy, and his lover, Grace—whom Frank says is English although we come to learn that she is Irish, and to whom Frank persistently refers as his “mistress” although both Grace and Teddy agree that she was his wife. Each of the characters’ monologues circles around the same territory: namely, a series of events in their shared past that culminated with Frank’s murder and, later, Grace’s suicide. But the audience grows increasingly aware of discrepancies in the recountings, from [End Page 96] the...