After last year's terrific production of David Mamet's American Buffalo at The Kings Arms, Rising Moon has reunited director David Thacker and actor Colin Connor in the same Salford pub venue for this dark tale from the late Irish writer Brian Friel.
The play's story is told through four monologues by three characters, offering different and sometimes contradictory accounts of the same events. Francis Hardy, or Frank, is the faith healer of the title touring small Welsh and Scottish towns and villages with his show in which he tries to heal the sick and disabled, sometimes successfully according to all three of them, but Frank admits that nine times out of ten it doesn't, and he always knows at the start when nothing is going to happen. He introduces Gracie as his mistress from somewhere in Yorkshire, although she tells us that he often does this to upset her whereas she is actually his wife, and her accent shows she is as Irish as he is.
The final member of the trio to speak is Londoner Teddy, whose job is to manage Frank and organise his touring schedule, but, despite his mantra that "friends is friends and work is work and never the twain shall meet", he ends up organising aspects of their lives in which a manager should not be involved—and perhaps ends up feeling a little too close to Mrs Hardy than he should.
The chronology of the stories and of when the protagonists are telling them—or even whether they are still alive when they are speaking to us—isn't certain, but some events keep coming up across their accounts. There is the time in Wales when only ten people turned up but he cured them all and a farmer left them a wallet of cash, which Frank blew on a posh hotel for him and Grace, and there was the man with the twisted finger that Frank cured. Then there was the death of a child, which Frank doesn't tell us about—the others tell us he never mentions it to anyone, as though it never happened—and the story that only Teddy tells of getting a phone call from the police in London, a year after he had last seen the Hardys in Ireland, asking him to identify a body.
But the stories are building towards one event, when they moved to Ballybeg, a fictional Irish town that pops up in several of Friel's plays. He knew that 'McGarrie' was being brought to the pub where he was drinking to be cured, he knew he wouldn't be able to cure him, the barman warned him what would happen if he didn't, but he stayed.
David Thacker's production gives each character his or her own space in the room, with the audience scattered amongst them. Frank has just a wooden chair with a hat on it but wanders freely (which causes some lighting issues as he is often in shadow, with some of the audience better lit than he is); Grace has a kitchen table and two chairs, a shelf of books with an old wireless set and a bottle of whiskey; Teddy has the banner from Frank's show, rescued from being thrown out, a record player on which he plays Fred Astaire singing "The Way You Look Tonight", with which Frank would start his show, and a row of beer bottles. The audience's seats are moved around in the interval to accommodate this.
This is a powerful piece of theatre that, as it is all told to us rather than shown, requires some concentration on the audience's part, but it is worth the effort, especially delivered by three great actors giving totally committed performances, each in a different register: Colin Connor, a reliable and versatile actor who always gives a great performance, makes Frank hesitant and regretful but proud of some of what he is done, Vicky Binns gives a remarkably intense, tour-de-force performance as an angry but loyal Grace and Rupert Hill's Teddy is more of a casual, friendly and funny 'Mr Showbiz' character, but with some sadness to get off his chase, perhaps using the beer—as Grace uses the whiskey—to try to wash away some of the memories.
My colleague David Cunningham said that American Buffalo felt "like a mainstream show had taken a wrong turn and ended up on the fringe", but we are very lucky that the Manchester fringe is producing the sorts of plays that we used to see a lot more on the 'mainstream' stages to this standard.