043 – Faith Healer, by Brian Friel
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Frank Hardy is a faith healer who is only occasionally able to heal. In fact nine times out of ten nothing happens. Frank, his long-suffering, indefatigably loyal wife Grace, and his manager, Teddy, tour small towns in Scotland and Wales hoping that Frank’s gift may reveal itself to the hopeless few that turn up to be cured. Grace and Teddy are tethered to Frank by their lack of alternatives and by his intermittent charisma and charm, despite his indifference and cruelty. When they have finally exhausted their chances in Britain they return to Ireland, where on a night in a pub in Donegal they reach the end of the road.
Each of these three characters tells their own version of their tawdry and tragic story in a sequence of monologues that together form Irish playwright Brian Friel’s masterpiece, Faith Healer. Although the premiere of the play in New York in 1979 was not a success, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin gambled on restaging it shortly thereafter, and it was a critical and popular triumph. The seminal 1980 Abbey production was directed by its young Artistic Director Joe Dowling, who recently returned to the same theatre more than 40 years later to direct a landmark revival of the play.
I am thrilled to be able to talk with Joe Dowling about a magnificent play that he has a unique knowledge of.
Joe Dowling
Joe Dowling was born and educated in Dublin where at the age of 28 he became the youngest Artistic Director in the history of the Abbey Theatre. He followed his time at the Abbey by running the Gaiety theatre in Dublin, before moving to North America, where in 1996 he was appointed Artistic Director of the prestigious Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. In his twenty years in charge at the Guthrie he directed more than 50 productions, including Shakespeare, American classics by O’Neill, Miller and Williams, as well as Irish plays of course, including Faith Healer in 2009, which he not only directed but also appeared in.
Joe recommended The Gigli Concert by Tom Murphy
Photo by Joan Marcus
The Footnotes to our episode on Faith Healer include observations on the elusive faith of the healers and the healed, and on the emotional truth of our memories.
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115 – The Dance of Death by August Strindberg
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August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death is set in a remote army base on the coast of Sweden, where an army captain and his wife are trapped together in an unhappy marriage. The captain, bitter at his lack of promotion, and his wife, frustrated at having been forced to give up her career as an actress, occupy their empty hours tearing into each other in a brutal dance of mutual cruelty.
Strindberg’s scorching portrait of marital strife was written in 1900, but has had a lasting influence. Arthur Miller dubbed Strindberg, “the mad inventor of modern theatre”, and echoes of his unflinching dissection of marital discord can be seen in the plays of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and John Osborne.
Sir Richard Eyre adapted and directed a wonderful production of Dance of Death at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames earlier this year, and I am delighted that Sir Richard joins me in this episode to guide us through Strindberg’s blistering onslaught on marriage.
114 – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
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William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is described on the title page in the first publication of its text in 1598 as “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie.” I imagine that the epithets were intended to highlight the play’s courtly aesthetic, its frothy merry-go-round of courtship, and above all perhaps, its ostentatiously intricate word play. For it is a play rich in the love and perils of language.
I am joined to assay Shakespeare’s conceited comedy by the Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, Tom Littler. In the summer of 2026 Tom adapted and directed a magical double bill of Shakespeare, producing Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing in repertory, and staging them both ‘en plein air’.
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
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Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
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