Faith Healing
There is a long tradition of faith healers in Ireland who have the power of what is known as the “cure”. The cure can consist of magical or religious healing, occasionally combined with herbal remedies, and according to an Irish Times article from 2013 there are still hundreds of healers operating. Healers are universally reticent to talk about how their power works, and there is very little public evidence available. Advertising is virtually prohibited, and apparently it is taboo to take any money, contrary to Frank Hardy’s practice.

Folklore has that it is only the seventh son of a seventh son, or seventh daughter of a seventth daughter who could be gifted with the cure. Frank recalls that their poster used to say that he was the seventh son of the seventh son – a bogus claim as he tells us that he was an only child. Perhaps it is harder to find faith healers today because there are fewer families with seven children!

More often than not the ritual has a Christian element, and Frank suggests the analogy with the church when he calls it a “a ministry without responsibility, a vocation without a ministry.” There is certainly an association between the elusiveness of Frank’s gift and religious faith, both of which defy explicit proof. The Faith Healer also seems to require that both the healer and the healed must have faith. As a real-life healer propounded: “For those who believe in such cures no explanation is necessary and for those who do not, no explanation is possible.” A maxim for the paradox of faith.

Following her final separation from Frank, Grace visits another type of healer, her GP. The pills he prescribes and the advice he gives her seem futile to cure her “distraught mental state.” This may be because she does not believe in his cure. She knows that only Frank “can put his white hands on her face and still this tumult” inside her.

There is a brilliant observation in the play of the psychology of the people coming to the healer, who do not entirely want to be cured. Frank says that they hated the healer because coming to him was a “public acknowledgment of their desperation. And even though they told themselves they were here because of the remote possibility of a cure, they knew in their hearts they had not come to be cured but for confirmation that they were incurable; not in hope but for the elimination of hope; for the removal of that final impossible chance – that’s why they came – to seal their anguish, for the content of finality.” 

But, “occasionally, just occasionally, the miracle would happen…And then… a sudden flooding of dreadfully hopeless hope”.

This hopeless hope might just as well be describing the incurable misery that binds Frank and Grace. And when Frank finally goes to meet his end he removes any more impossible chance, “for the content of finality”.