Joe Dowling Archives - The Play Podcast

Joe Dowling

by Douglas Schatz | Apr 1, 2022 | Contributor

Joe Dowling

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.

Photo by Joan Marcus

Podcast Episode(s)

043 - Faith Healer, by Brian Friel

Recommended Play(s)

Joe recommended The Gigli Concert by Tom Murphy

043 – Faith Healer, by Brian Friel

by Douglas Schatz | Apr 1, 2022 | Podcast Episodes

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.

Recommended Play

Joe recommended The Gigli Concert by Tom Murphy

Photo by Joan Marcus

We have footnotes for this episode …

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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063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel

May 24, 2023 | Podcast Episodes

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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.

Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.

062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward

Apr 26, 2023 | Podcast Episodes

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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.

061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn

Apr 13, 2023 | Podcast Episodes

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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.

I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.