paul rae : presencing

Part 3: Faith


If those three rows of chairs in the picture of the Poliziano Theatre prefigure any performance in particular, it is Faith Healer by Brian Friel: "Three rows of chairs - not more than fifteen seats in all - occupy one third of the acting area stage left" (stage direction in Friel, 1996: 331). More so even than Ionesco's classic The Chairs (1952), the opening of Faith Healer exploits the anthropomorphic quality of the empty seat. A spectral audience attends the event from the start, and when the first narrator, Frank, describes the public at one of his healing sessions as "…delegates, legati, chosen because of their audacity; and…outside, poised, mute, waiting in the half-light…hundreds of people who held their breath while we were in the locality" (337) it becomes clear that the vacant chairs, bleeding absence, betoken a parable of presence.

Like most parables, Faith Healer is about people struggling with the consequences of belief. However, although Ireland and Irishness are of signal, if subtle, importance, references to organised religion are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, the central conceit of the play is that, like belief in God for many, the super-natural - in this case, healing powers - is taken as a given. Given by whom never concerns the three characters in the play; given to what end obsesses them inordinately.

Faith Healer is made up of four monologues, the first and last delivered by Frank, a Faith Healer, the second by Grace, his (alleged) wife and accomplice, and the third by Teddy, their manger. Each describes their version of a shabby, impoverished life on tour, Frank's sporadically miraculous healing powers, the stillbirth of Grace and Frank's child, and a strangely willed tragedy that befalls Frank upon his return to Ireland. The characters tell their tales in the past tense, but their current temporal location remains unclear, as do the facts of the events, since each narrator contradicts the other two. What all three share, however, is a sense of Frank's precocious talent as responsible for both their rankest hardships and warmest moments of togetherness. As each trawls their memories in a bid to account for events, a picture emerges of fractious relationships and a self-loathing need for the public, mediated through a volatile mix of desire and disgust.

What weighs most heavily on each character is the challenge of having - and keeping - faith. Not faith in anything, but sufficient ballast to the drab ordinariness of their lives to keep them afloat, if not aloft. It manifests itself in Frank's 'gift', and the knowledge that every now and then, he "stood before a man and placed my hands on him and watched him become whole in my presence" (333). In their own ways, Frank, Grace and Teddy are all in thrall to this power. Frank: "…for those few hours I had become whole in myself, and perfect in myself" (333). Grace: "…always before a performance he'd be…in complete mastery…in such complete mastery that everything is harmonized for him…" (343). For Teddy, it lurks in reflective silences - ominous rents in an over-perky patter. Yet the capricious nature of this occasional magic ('nine times out of ten nothing at all happened' (334)) feeds off their desperate and acrimonious situation to exact a fearsome price. Frank is racked with self-doubt, Grace needs him more than wants him, and Teddy aches with the loss of a surrogate love. Presence, the play suggests, is contingent on otherness, be it located in another, or within oneself. At the close of the narrative, this point is forcefully made when Frank's return to Ireland - apparently a homecoming - coincides with a definitive encounter with otherness. Befriending a rowdy wedding group, he first finds favour with them by curing a misshapen finger, and then takes up the reckless challenge of healing their badly crippled friend. Home at last, Frank puts an end to the questions that 'rotted his life' by embracing the otherness that authorised his presence - and with it, fatal certainty: "And as I moved across that yard towards them, then for the first time I had a simple and genuine sense of home-coming. Then for the first time there was no atrophying terror; and the maddening questions were silent. At long last I was renouncing chance" (376).

And what of that other other - the fleshy analogue of Frank's ghostly 'legati', 'wating in the half-light' of the auditorium, mercifully full when I saw Jonathan Kent's Almeida production of Faith Healer in November 2001? The supreme risk of the play is to stage a parable of presence. The overlap between play and performance is potentially huge, and the vocabulary of the craft so in evidence that when Frank states, within minutes of the opening: "…I always knew right from the beginning…I always knew when nothing was going to happen" (334), the question is immediately begged: 'and what is the answer tonight?'

Kent's production met the challenge head on. Mounted at the Almeida's temporary home, a former bus depot in King's Cross, the stage was huge and movement minimal. Against the bare industrial brickwork of the building, it was as if the actors drew the space around them, turned its vastness against itself to focus attention upon themselves. It is a risky strategy - when someone stands before you and tells a story, you are either with them, or against them. Ken Stott's grating avuncularity as Frank left me cold to begin with. It is always hard to warm to an untrustworthy man, at least until one knows roughly how untrustworthy. For this reason, it was only when Geraldine James' edgy Grace took the stage and began to contradict Frank's story that I was really able to take to him.

If the critics are anything to go by, then Ian McDiarmid's Teddy was what really convinced audiences that the production matched the aspirations of the play ('…one of the finest things on the London stage' (Billington, www)). For me, it was a simple piece of theatrical magic. A tattered curtain, drawn across the stage by invisible hands between scenes, covered seamless and incomprehensibly swift set-changes. I simply couldn't believe my eyes when the curtain, moving at an even pace across the stage over a matter of twenty seconds, managed to 'disappear' Frank and his chairs, and 'materialise' Grace in her living room. Nor was I inclined to work out how it was done, for the inexplicability of the event contributed a lingering sense of the other-worldly to the play that was crucial in generating a context in which Frank's powers were perfectly conceivable. After all, the actors do not have to convince the audience that Frank could perform miraculous deeds, simply that he might, and if they can pull off a set change like that, then as far as I am concerned, he is well on his way.

What is the relationship between presence and faith? There is a tendency in deconstruction-influenced analyses to suggest a linear causality: the assertion of the former gives rise to the latter. Faith Healer, on the other hand, reveals the chicken-and-egg nature of such a question, and instead taps into the powerful feedback loop that operates between the two. The downright shabbiness of the enterprise described, and the constant threat that belief will be revealed as mere superstition, only serves to highlight faith and presence as each a manifestation of the other. In more established terms, an argument for the on-going valency of this observation in art is made by George Steiner in his book Real Presences: "that which underwrites the presumption of creativity, of signification in our encounters with text, with music, with art…is a theology" (1989: 216). Steiner's subsequent claim that the implicit relationship between art and religion has only recently, by historical standards, been rent asunder in the West serves as a stern reminder that all theatre carries traces of its faith healing roots. However, his argument is weakened on several counts by underestimation. He pointedly refuses to account for the diversity of audience reception to the artistic products he interprets so rigourously, nor for the criteria he employs to anoint a given work with greatness. More interestingly in this context, however, is his underestimation of the power of computers. He writes:

…it is neither the Logos in any transcendent connotation, not the secular, empirical systems of lexical-grammatical utterance and writing which are now the eminent carriers of speculative energy, or verifiable and applicable discoveries and information…It is the algebraic function, the linear and non-linear equation, the binary code. At the heart of futurity lies the 'byte' and the number (115).

Writing in 1989, one of the fascinating features of Internet usage from the nineties onwards that Steiner can perhaps be forgiven for failing to foresee, was the use to which the technology would be put by religion, organised and otherwise, and this not only for purposes of proselytisation and fund-raising. Attending a conference at which two communications professors from Christian universities in Texas gave a paper on video conferencing, I was struck not only by their advanced grasp and creative use of the technology (especially by comparison with their secular counterparts on the same panel), but also their facility at describing its operations. It soon dawned on me that this was born of a significant overlap between their understanding of new media, and the vocabulary of faith, belief and attendant practices, such as prayer, which peppered their presentation. Could it be that, while for centuries religious belief has been made manifest through art, has, indeed rendered art the structure and model of belief ("Music and the metaphysical…music and religious feeling, have been virtually inseparable" (Steiner; 216)), Steiner's 'futurity of the byte' will see advanced technologies take over this function? The question is not so simple, of course: scientific models have long played a role in the structure and understanding of belief systems, as any number of examples from the Renaissance can demonstrate. More pertinent, at this point, is a return to Faith Healer, for there is to be found a sustained meditation on one element that intervenes powerfully into the presence-faith feedback loop: doubt. Just as presence is contingent on otherness, the play suggests, so is faith on doubt. Frank's audience, he informs us, come in the secret hope of having all hope banished: they come anticipating failure, and occasionally, they are wrong-footed by a miracle. Such complex inversions are what allows Steiner's transcendent impulses to inhabit an art work without overwhelming it. Friel's characters are racked with doubt, which in turn haunts every minute of every scene in the successful realisation of the play. It is what makes for an exhilarating event. For the online believer, on the other hand, doubt is only ever savoured in the brief duration of the download.

Friel, Brian (1996(1980)) 'Faith Healer' in Plays: One. London: Faber and Faber, pp.327-376.

Billington, Michael (2001)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,3604,609279,00.html

Steiner, George (1989) Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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