If you hate the Irish, you’ll adore this play

Faith Healer is a classic Oirish wrist-slasher about three sponging half-wits caught in a downward spiral of penury, booze, squalor, sexual repression, bad healthcare, murderous violence and non-stop drizzle. The mood of grinding despair never lets up for a second as the healer, Frank Hardy, along with his moaning wife and their Cockney sidekick, motors around the British Isles trying to cadge pennies from cripples in exchange for bogus cures. Every cliché in the rich thesaurus of Celtic misery is brought together in this rancid melodrama about mob justice.

Brian Friel’s play premiered in 1979 on Broadway, but the action is set in the early 1950s and the culture it describes belongs to medieval times or even the Dark Ages. From a lofty height, Hardy pours scorn on superstitious and ignorant Celtic bumpkins, all oppressed by incurable diseases, and all eager to find salvation in the blessings of a fake miracle-worker.