Brilliantly performed twaddle: Old Vic’s Faith Healer reviewed

The Old Vic refuses to reopen. Director Matthew Warchus says the social distancing rules make it impossible for him to reach the 70 per cent capacity he needs to break even. That was true in the old days when the Vic had to put on lavish fare and tempt audiences away from the opulent variety of the West End. But the competition has gone. Warchus is free to mount cheap, simple dramas which recoup their costs quickly. Curiously, this is what he’s doing with Brian Friel’s three-hander, Faith Healer, but the show is performed in an empty house and watched live by spectators via Zoom. The pandemic has made Warchus allergic to playgoers. What a shame. When Lilian Baylis ran the Vic during the Great War she kept it open even when Zeppelins were bombing London. ‘What’s an air-raid,’ she famously boasted, ‘when my curtain’s up?’

Faith Healer, written in 1980, is set during the pinched post-war years when disease and physical deformity were commoner than they are now.