Faith Healer - Donmar Warehouse
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
LYNDSEY Turner will direct Stephen Dillane (as Frank) and Gina McKee (Grace) in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, which runs at the Donmar Warehouse from June 28 (previews from June 23) to August 20, 2016.
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 accounts of their lives together and their memories of the past collide as they attempt to understand the power which lies at the heart of Frank’s ministry.
Following her productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Fathers and Sons, Lyndsey Turner returns to the Donmar to direct Friel’s great play about the possibility of genius, and the certainty of failure.
Brian Friel (1929 – 2015) is considered one of the greatest Irish dramatists, having written over 30 plays across six decades. He is best known for works such as Translations, Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing with Lughnasa, which won Best Play at the Tony Awards, Olivier Awards and New York Drama Critics’ Circle.
Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 with actor Stephen Rea where they staged Translations, which went on to win the Ewart-Biggs Peace Prize. In the late 1990s, Friel wrote a number of adaptations of the work of Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen.
Lyndsey Turner’s previous work at the Donmar includes Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Fathers and Sons.
Her credits elsewhere include Tipping The Velvet (Lyric Hammersmith), Hamlet (Barbican), Chimerica – Olivier Award for Best Director (Almeida/West End), Contractions, A Miracle and Our Private Life (Royal Court Theatre), Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Edgar and Annabel and There Is A War (National Theatre), Joseph K and Nocturnal (Gate Theatre), My Romantic History (Traverse/Bush/Sheffield Theatres) and The Lesson (Arcola Theatre).
Turner has worked at the Royal Court as Trainee Associate Director and International Associate and as Associate Director at Sheffield Theatres, where her work includes Alice and The Way of the World.
Stephen Dillane returns to the Donmar following acclaimed performances in Katie Mitchell’s 1996 production of Beckett’s Endgame, TS Eliot’s Four Quartets (2009), and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing which transferred to the Albery Theatre and Broadway and for which he won a Tony Award.
His other theatre credits include The Master Builder and Macbeth (Almeida Theatre), Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, Our Late Night and Hush (Royal Court Theatre), Uncle Vanya (Young Vic), Hamlet (Gielgud Theatre) and The Coast of Utopia, Dancing at Lughnasa, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Angels in America (National Theatre).
Dillane’s film work includes The Hours and Welcome to Sarajevo. On television, he played the roles of Stannis Baratheon and Thomas Jefferson in the respective HBO series Game of Thrones and John Adams, and Karl Roebuck in The Tunnel which won him an International Emmy Award for Best Actor in 2014. In 2009, he won a Best Actor BAFTA Television Award for his role as Anthony Hurndall in The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall.
Gina McKee returns to the Donmar following her performances in King Lear (also UK Tour and Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York), Ivanov (Wyndham’s) directed by Michael Grandage and Old Times directed by Roger Michell.
Her other work on stage includes The Mother (The Ustinov, Bath), Richard III (Trafalgar Studios), Di and Viv and Rose (Hampstead Theatre), Separate Tables (Chichester Festival Theatre) and Aristocrats (National Theatre).
McKee’s screen work includes Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, Atonement, Scenes of a Sexual Nature and Notting Hill (film); Caterina Sforza in the Showtime series The Borgias, Mary Cox in the BBC’s Our Friends in the North, Hebburn, Secret State, Line of Duty, Vera, Waking The Dead, Old Curiosity Shop and The Forsyte Saga (TV).
Read more about the Donmar’s 2016 Spring Season.