I am in New York once again, and yesterday caught the current Broadway production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, starring a stellar trio of exemplary actors, Ralph Fiennes in the title role, local stage goddess Cherry Jones as his wife, and Tony-winning Ian McDiarmid as his agent. Say what you will about Broadway and its admitted reliance on such star billing, but it does at least mean that a seriously challenging play — in form (it comprises four extended monologues) and content — is actually playing there. And this is actually the second time it has been on Broadway: an earlier production in 1979, with a cast led by James Mason in the title role, only ran for 20 performances, but a new set of producers — led by Britain’s Sonia Friedman and Michael Colgan of Dublin’s Gate Theatre (where this staging originated, but without Jones in the cast) — have shown fresh faith in bringing it back to Braodway.
Yet the play has never, by contrast, played in the West End at all — London has only seen it at the Royal Court (in 1992, with Donal McCann) and the Almeida (in 2001, with Ken Stott). So in some ways, Broadway is more adventurous than the West End. And it was extraordinary to feel the concentration, and appreciation, of a Broadway audience for a play of this serious kind, playing alongside more conventional Broadway fare like Spamalot and The Lion King next door. On the next block, The History Boys is New York’s biggest and most profitable dramatic hit, proving there is an appetite for plays in New York as well as musicals.
Of course, both of these — plus Conor McPherson’s Shining City and Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore — are plays from England or Ireland, not indigenous plays, of which there is only one (Doubt) currently playing on Broadway.
And it’s fascinating, too, to notice the British takeover of American musicals, too — as well as Spamalot, based on a quintessentially English source (Mony Python), I saw Jonathan Pryce bamboozling a Broadway audience into submission on Friday night in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
