Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones on questions of truth and lies in a celebrated play by Brian Friel

It has often been said that a good priest, whose job is to promote dusty old belief systems, must combine the gifts of an actor with those of an antique dealer. Frank Hardy, the hard-drinking protagonist of Brian Friel's Faith Healer (1979), has acting skills in abundance. His cockney manager, Teddy, even equates his client's talent with that of Laurence Olivier, although he later suggests that it has more in common with that of a previous client, Rob Roy the Piping Dog, a performing whippet of great skill but little brain. In a long opening monologue, Hardy addresses the question of whether his peripatetic healing ministry may have been only a circus stunt - "which of course was nonsense, I think". His boldly swaggering "of course" is nigglingly undercut by the afterthought "I think", and typical of the teasing complexity of Friel's best writing. Here it's given mesmerising uncertainty by Ken Stott: his pudgy face and presence command the cavernous space of the old bus station that is the Almeida Theatre's current home, and which serves remarkably well to represent the dozens of draughty village halls in "all those dying Welsh villages", as well as many equally moribund Scottish ones, where Hardy has regularly exercised his spell "for one night only". Stott's open features, which at first look easy to read, prove increasingly enigmatic in the course of the play until, in the closing minutes, we are plunged into every kind of darkness. Every time we think we have got the hang of him, and of his personal narrative, doubts arise. Because Hardy disarms us early on by freely confessing that his claim to be a "seventh son of a seventh son" was "a lie", many other things he tells us - for example, that his infertile "mistress" Grace is a stoutly sensible Yorkshirewoman of great loyalty and practicality - seem entirely plausible.

For newcomers to the play, it is a real shock to encounter Grace herself in the second scene. She is a beautiful and highly educated Ascendancy Irishwoman, the only child of a judge, who has qualified as a solicitor. She also believes herself to have been Hardy's lawful wife and the mother of their stillborn son. Geraldine James gives a stunning performance, nervously chain- smoking for Ireland as she projects a self- lacerating compound of guilt, anger and grief that is quite physically distressing to watch. If it seems that this elegant but damaged lady doesn't really "go with" the coarse braggart Hardy, that only strengthens the cogency of the play, because one of its few narrative certainties is that this cannot possibly have been a happy union.

Ian McDiarmid gives an astonishingly powerful performance as the comically seedy Teddy, crowning a run of superb performances. If it's a mark of a major poet that he can make a moving lyric out of throwing an apple core into a waste-paper basket, as Philip Larkin did, it must be a mark of a world-class actor that he can turn getting yet another bottle of beer out of a cupboard into great theatre. The logic of this performance is that McDiarmid should soon tackle the role of Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer - I saw Olivier in this role long ago, when I was a teenager, and guess that McDiarmid would be even better.

Although there is a huge amount of acting in Friel's play - acting about acting, acting as a con trick, acting as saloon-bar entertainment, acting as self-deception - there is surprisingly little dealing in antiques (in the sense of conventional religion), and in particular very little of the Catholic framework that one might anticipate. Frank Hardy's ministry is essentially both Protestant and Nonconformist in its self-reliance, and it has been pri- marily practised, or performed, in the strongly Nonconformist western fringes of Wales and Scotland. Only one element of Catholic practice dominates the play - that of confession - and it seems that it is we, the audience, who are required to offer absolution to its three characters.

As for the play's repeatedly deferred climax in Hardy's and Friel's native Ireland, a text from the Fourth Gospel applies: "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not."

Faith Healer is at the Almeida at King's Cross, London N1 (020 7359 4404), until 19 January 2002

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