Faith Healer

LAST year Tinderbox toured Stewart Parker's Pentecost. This year, in common with Druid's splendid Beauty Queen of Leenane, their autumn tour ignores Belfast's middle-brow Festival at Queen's and brings Brian Friel's formidable Faith Healer round village halls, peripheral, arts spaces. Indeed whilst it's a splendid play in any space there is an extra frisson when it is viewed in Holywood's Queen's Hall rather than in the finely wrought Riverside.

Friel himself never shies away from devices - in Faith Healer, as in Kurosowa's Rashornon, the tragedy is told from the point of view of its three participants: a dead man, a charismatic, manipulative Irish charmer turned to drink, who wrestled as many of Ireland's flawed geniuses have done - with belief in his owns legends; his suicidal wife married out of her class; his Cockney roadie, detritus in shown business's wasteland, managing fat ladies and faith healers.

David Heap's Faith Healer is chipper and cool, physically controlled, physically slight, lacking the menace of presence which made the part Donal McCann's. Thus, whilst we get an intelligent reading of Frank, the play, by degrees, is diminished in stature. Should he fall, and fall he must to rough hands in Donegal, his memorial will be no Ozimandias but, rather something slim, rectangular, black. And besides, Irish accent he has none. Linda Wray however excels herself, gauging her descent into hell as the Omagh (Friel's home-town) magistrate's daughter brought low by this profligate pied piper of a charlatan.

Unfortunately as the surviving third of this ill-fated triumvirate, Mal Whyte offers up a wooden absurdity, the kind of Cockney once beloved of Hollywood. Stephen Wright's detached direction, though marred by clumsy entr'acte business, lets the text, rather than the text's soul, speak.