Whose information?

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It was an accident, an evening in NY free from commitments and OUP meetings, without friends around. Kia and I thought we could go to the theatre. They were showing "Faith Healer", Brian Friel's recitative. We got lucky and bought two excellent tickets.

The play is simple. Three characters speak four monologues in four parts, with a ten minutes break. The first and last monologue belong to Frank Hardy (Ralph Fiennes), an Irish traveling healer who, after some mixed experiences in Wales and Scotland, returns to Ireland in the hope of restoring his ailing powers. The second monologue comes from Grace (Cherry Jones), his long-time mistress, who has forsaken her bourgeois, legal background to join Frank, whom she considers a genius and charlatan. The third is delivered by Teddy (Ian McDiarmid), a seedy showbiz agent who has stayed with the litigious couple partly out of a devotion partly for reasons he himself cannot fully understand.

For two hours, the four monologues recount roughly the same story from each of the three different agents' perspective, refining and complementing our understanding of the internal drama and social problems of a man who, in the end, does not know who he really is or what he should make of his alleged gift.

It is very hard to explain the impact of the play. Ralph Fiennes is so involving, powerful, moving, intelligent and dramatic to empty the minds and hearts of the audience and fill them with a story that is rather simple in its outlines but profound and enormously rich in its human hues and implications. The resonance with one's own experiences is noiseless. His two monologues are a mixture of Greekly-tragic scratches by real life on anyone's skin, a metaphor for the struggle of the artist in coming to terms with his work, and an existentialist comment on whether anyone really ever understands himself.

I found two themes particularly fascinating. How information in all its varieties (memories, attention, self-narratives, social re-identification etc.) shapes and guides the self; and how the flows of information gradually and yet ever newly converge and spiral around ethereal but nonetheless substantive poles of attractions, moulding facts, people, events.

Faith Healer is directed by Jonathan Kent. It will be at the Booth Theater until July 30th. If you cannot see the play, you may read the text in Selected Plays of Brian Friel.

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