Did Faith Healer Cast its Spell on Broadway Critics?

Brian Friel's Faith Healer was not a success when it first played on Broadway in 1979, but now it is back in a production starring noteworthy actors Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid. The play—composed of four monologues—opened a limited engagement at the Booth Theatre on May 4. Did critics feel healed by the drama?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "Acting this good can be healing. In Brian Friel's Faith Healer, the simplest and most hypnotic show on Broadway, audiences find themselves in the capable and tender care of three very different, indeed vividly distinct, pros: Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid. Just the sound of director Jonathan Kent's spare, evocative production-those three voices, each speaking solo but between them conjuring the reverberations of a vanished world-has an intimate, unamplified musicality that practically qualifies as folk medicine in itself. Leaning in intently, as we do, to absorb such well-considered performances certainly feels cleansing."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "Anyone who starts listening, with full attention, to the words—and, just as important, the silences—of the three characters who tell their horrible, fantastic and oddly familiar story should be fatally hooked. Intricate and self-contradicting, the narrative has the addictive pull of a detective yarn, a cosmic version in which the clues do and do not add up to a clear solution. And in Mr. Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid this production has storytellers who know how to hold a stage unconditionally, even when, in Ms. Jones's case, the performer doesn't entirely match the part."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "This electrically charged new staging by Jonathan Kent has you on the edge of your seat, waiting, wondering. Fiennes, seemingly born for the play, is a remarkably intimate actor. He shares confidences rather than tells stories… Dismiss, at your peril, McDiarmid's performance as a glossily deft Cockney music-hall turn, for layered beneath all that fascinating glitter is a depth of human feeling… And finally there's Jones, who has made luminosity into an art form, honesty into a means of histrionic communication, and nakedness into a state of dramatic being."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "As Frank, Fiennes exhibits a kind of subdued charm that masks a turbulent soul… Jones displays that fortitude and defiant nobility we associate with long-suffering, self-sacrificing Irish womanhood… McDiarmid probably best known from the Star Wars films has a beguiling raffishness that suggests Teddy had been in English music hall… Because the characters never interact onstage, their conflicting voices echo in our minds long after we leave the theater."

David Rooney of Variety: "In Jonathan Kent's illuminating production, the dark sorcery of language, of recitation and interpretation, powers a challenging play that stubbornly withholds its revelations as it explores the infinite nuances of truth and fabrication… In a production designed with meticulous precision, the three characters appear to be conjured by lighting illusionist Mark Henderson out of brooding darkness, hovering between flesh and spirit. And Kent artfully harnesses the three distinct acting styles of the excellent cast to mirror Friel's multiple takes on the same events."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Hardy is a role Fiennes was born to play. With his matinee-idol looks, Fiennes is the right actor for this vaguely overtheatrical, slightly gone-to-seed Irishman who travels the small towns of Scotland and Wales attempting to cure the afflicted… The production, which originated at the Gate Theatre in Dublin earlier this year, is directed by Jonathan Kent in a straightforward manner that's dazzling in its simplicity and yet very theatrical."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "[Fiennes'] Frank is at once defeated and defiant, a ravaged man who nonetheless retains the fire that drew, and singed, his enablers… Jones is, likewise, predictably captivating as Grace, adding to the string of vanity-free bravura performances with which she has spoiled Broadway audiences in recent years. And Ian McDiarmid is fiercely funny and heart-rending as the flamboyant but haunted Teddy, who for all his protestations of professional detachment is an integral member of Frank and Grace's dysfunctional, interdependent family. As traced here, that family's strange journey offers proof that true interpretive artists are still being nurtured in commercial art."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "The revival that opened last night at the Booth Theatre is a peculiar but mesmerizing evening. Jonathan Kent's bravely exposed staging offers a microscopic yet magisterial acting lesson by Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and the dazzling Ian McDiarmid… Kent, Fiennes' theater director of choice, allows us to see faces change brutally, as if in unforgiving close-up. We don't care much about the story, but we are as rapt by the storytelling as if we had curled up with a strange, compelling novel."