Allen & Unwin Faith Healer book English Paperback 80 pages

Weaving together the stories of a travelling healer, his wife and his manager, Faith Healer is a powerful and haunting work of art by one of Ireland's pre-eminent playwrights.

Throughout the remote and forgotten corners of the British Isles, Frank Hardy offers the promise of redemption to the sick and the suffering. But his is an unreliable gift, a dangerous calling which brings him into conflict with his wife Grace and his manager Teddy. Their competing accounts of past events reveal the fragility of memory and the necessity of stories as a means of survival.Brian Friel's Faith Healer was first produced at the Longacre Theatre, New York, in April 1979 and was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in June 2016. 'The night of Faith Healer is one that still blazes in recollection for me, as religious experiences of art do. And it became a sort of touchstone for me in understanding not only Mr. Friel's work with a depth I hadn't appreciated before but also for defining the elusiveness of great art and the pain of the artist who creates it.' - Ben Brantley, New York Times

Born in 1929 in Omagh, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, Brian Friel was one of Ireland's most prominent playwrights. In addition to his published plays, he has written short stories; screenplays; film, TV and Radio adaptations of his plays; and several pieces of non-fiction on the role of theatre and the artist. He died in 2015.