The first time I ever saw Michael Sheen, he was blazing like the sun. He was 30 then, making his Broadway debut as a divinely inspired, impishly behaved Mozart in the 1999 revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus.” He gave such undiluted radiance to a young composer’s brilliance that he eclipsed everyone else onstage, and it felt almost dangerous to stare at him for too long.
Two decades later — on Saturday, in fact — I watched a 51-year-old Sheen portraying another artist, an older man raking through the ashes of a career that had burned only fitfully. As Frank Hardy, the title character of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” which was streamed live from the Old Vic Theater in London, Sheen became a walking shadow, a figure whose doubts had long ago overwhelmed his gift, the dubious but occasionally transcendent art of healing the sick and the maimed by faith alone. (And make no mistake: Friel is discussing the role of the artist here.)
But as the camera stared at Sheen, strutting and slinking across an empty stage before an audience of no one, you could sense the sparks in the embers. Frank is an Irish-born traveling seller of hope and a man whose talents are, to put it kindly, capricious.
Sheen drew Frank in lines of darkness that never entirely hid the light that still flickered disturbingly within. And an actor I had first valued for his incandescence was now working in subtle, murky shades that paradoxically illuminated one of the greatest plays ever written about the benediction and curse of the artist’s gift.
One of the great rewards of having been a theater critic for as long as I have is the privilege of seeing actors and plays change colors, shape and substance over the years. Sometimes, there is shrinkage. If “Faith Healer” — four monologues for three actors first staged in 1979 (with James Mason!) — tells us anything, it’s that greatness is never fixed.
Then there are those wondrous occasions when a performance startlingly shifts your perspective on a work you thought you knew well. A new, beckoning landscape opens up, there to tell you what you hadn’t figured out before and suggesting, with audacious hope, that this old and familiar play still teems with unexplored and mysterious life.
That’s what happened to me watching Sheen in Matthew Warchus’s enthralling production of “Faith Healer,” which ended its brief run on Saturday as part of the Old Vic: In Camera series of live performances, staged (to an empty house). I first saw “Faith Healer” in 1994, during my first year as a New York Times daily reviewer, a job I am leaving next month.
In that version, directed by Joe Dowling at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., Frank was played by the great Irish actor Donal McCann. McCann embodied Frank as a living dead man, trapped in an eternal fugue of reflection and regret. It’s a performance that still haunts my dreams, and it gave an otherworldly, fablelike shimmer to this account of a man who, on rare occasion, genuinely seemed to work miracles as he traveled rural Scotland and Wales in the company of his wife, Grace, and manager, Teddy.
The next time Frank showed up in my life, in 2006, he looked much more glamorous. That’s because he was being incarnated by Ralph Fiennes on Broadway, in a performance that homed in on the character’s contemptuous narcissism. It was a stinging, brooding performance that captured the destructiveness of an artist’s self-absorption, and it too has lingered in my recollection.
Now my memory must also make room for Sheen’s Frank, an interpretation that grounds the character in a grimy reality in ways I hadn’t thought possible. First seen weaving through a row of empty chairs, booming out the names of Welsh towns he visited on his healing tours, he exudes the stale aroma of an old-time vaudevillian’s greasepaint.
A barrel-shaped figure in a much-worn black suit, overcoat and fedora, his face half-covered by a grizzled beard, he would appear to be a posturing mediocrity, a mountebank with a smooth line in Irish gab. Then the camera moves in on his face, and you see something unspeakable in the eyes — fathomless pain and self-loathing and, yes, a glint of the ineffable, of genius, perhaps, that this shabby, middle-aged man can’t begin to make sense of.
Frank has the first and last monologues of “Faith Healer.” And the presence established by Sheen in the opening scene justifies the accounts of the two other characters in the play. That’s Grace (a superb Indira Varma, as a woman turned into an unstanched wound by a lacerating love) and Teddy (a cozily louche David Threlfall).
Not that the details match up in these characters’ anguished, faltering recollections of the bleak life they shared on the road, and its horrible and somehow inevitable conclusion. On the contrary, facts both trivial (who chose the music for Frank’s performances) and monumental (births, deaths) tend to change according to who’s telling the story.
But still, the sometimes sadistic but irresistible man Grace could never leave was palpably there in Sheen’s initial portrait. So was the none-too-bright, rather ordinary fellow described by Teddy, the Frank who turned into a figure of magnificence on those rare, outrageous occasions when he became what his advertisements said he was. And you understood why these three people, who were destined to wreck one another’s lives (and knew it), nonetheless had to stay together.
As is the custom of Old Vic: In Camera (whose earlier, starry offering have included Duncan Macmillan’s “Lungs,” with Claire Foy and Matt Smith and Stephen Beresford’s “Three Kings,” with Andrew Scott), there is very little scenery, but then there has never been with “Faith Healer.”
It takes place in the endless and open darkness of recollection, where the events and faces and words of another time keep changing shape. (The lighting, by Tim Lutkin and Sarah Brown, summons that dark realm beautifully.) In a way, it’s about how every one of us is an artist by default, reinventing the world each time we remember something.
If I saw a recording of this production at some point in the future, I think I’d discover it wasn’t quite the way I’ve described it here, after all. The singular blessing of live theater, which I have so cherished during my 27 years at The Times, is that it insists you learn to live with the memories of it, which are as mutable, perplexing and endlessly revealing as life itself.
Faith Healer
Performed Sept. 16-19; oldvictheatre.com
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‘Faith Healer’ Review: Michael Sheen Stirs the Embers in the Ashes - The New York Times
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