Theatre review: Faith Healer | Faust | Optimism | The Rap Guide to Evolution

Published on Friday 21 August 2009 17:41

Various venues

TWO years ago, the theme of the Edinburgh International Festival was about the meeting point of music and theatre. It was an idea you could see played out before you in Jonathan Mills' inaugural programme in shows such as the Wooster Group's La Didone, a collision between opera and postmodern theatre.

Last year, the theme was borders, which, although it gave the programme an intellectual coherence, was harder to identify on a show-by-show basis. Now, in his 2009 line-up, Mills is re-evaluating the Scottish Enlightenment, considering that moment in the 18th century when superstition gave way to rationalism and, for a variety of reasons, Edinburgh became the capital city of scientific, artistic and philosophical thought.

Only one week in and already this theme is resonating loudly across the EIF's theatre programme – although not quite in the way I had expected. I had half-imagined it would be a case of looking back reflectively on a long-gone era. But what productions such as Faith Healer, Faust and Optimism make us realise is that the Enlightenment is more than just a fixed moment in history. Far from being a fusty subject purely for academic discussion, the debate that animated thinkers in the 18th century is still with us today.

However much Adam Smith, Robert Burns and David Hume changed our world view, they did not change it enough to obliterate the struggle between the rational and the irrational that is inside all of us. That's why we need art. Plays, novels, songs and paintings are an attempt to give rational shape to irrational experience, to bring order to chaos, to make sense of a world that never ceases to puzzle us.

This is the reason playwright Brian Friel describes Francis Hardy, the central character in his magnificent 30-year-old play Faith Healer, as an artist. The word most people would use for this heavy drinking end-of-the-pier act, touring the church halls of Wales and Scotland and claiming to have God-given curative powers, is "charlatan". He is a con-man, trading on the credulity of the sick and the maimed, except that, every so often, some magic really does seem to happen.

Like an artist, he has a gift – uncontrollable, erratic, other-worldly – that ushers in occasional moments of transcendence. As the story emerges over four long monologues – performed by Dublin's Gate Theatre with mesmerising narrative power – Frank seems to be more and more a disreputable monomaniac, yet at the same time, we recognise in him a special quality, whether you'd call it charisma, charm or magic, that allows us to forgive him. He's not unlike the artists and pop stars in our own culture whose bad behaviour we tolerate as fair payment for the insights they give us in return.

Friel goes further by building a question of faith into the play itself. In each successive monologue, his characters contradict one another. Owen Roe as Frank, Ingrid Craigie as his wife Grace and Kim Durham as his manager Teddy recount much the same story about their life on the road and about Frank's final, fateful attempt at a miracle, but the details vary.

In one sense, those details are minor. It doesn't matter whether it was sunny or raining or who chose a particular record. But Friel is making a point about more than just the fallibility of memory. If we are to believe these characters, we have to put faith in them and in Friel himself. Only with that faith, blind and irrational though it may be, can a play as sublime as Faith Healer take its hold.

Blind faith, however, has its problems. Take the philosophy of optimism, an 18th century line of thought that reasoned that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Writing from the heart of the European Enlightenment, Voltaire was infuriated by the idea, which is why he subjected Candide, the eponymous hero of his 1759 novella, to an outrageous catalogue of misfortune.

The young man witnesses indignities from gang rape to mutilation, slavery to theft, all the while clinging on to the belief that all is right with the world. Instead of rising up in political fury, he passes off every misery as part of God's greater purpose.

In Tom Wright's Optimism, an adaptation of the book for Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre, the irony is never more heavy than at the end of the first act when a mud-soaked slave with a missing arm and an amputated foot struggles on to the stage and, in a painful growl, sings Altered Images' I Could Be Happy as if it was a Nick Cave number. The use of this and similarly carefree songs (Things Can Only Get Better, Wonderful Life) in Michael Kantor's bubbly, colourful production reminds us of our culture's predilection for escapism. We shrug off troubles such as global warming with a "what can you do?" nonchalance, trusting blindly that things will sort themselves out. Voltaire's book is 250 years old, but we are hardly any more rational in our approach to society's problems.

Channelling the spirit of the great silent movie clowns, Frank Woodley plays Candide as a tremulous innocent always one step behind the machinations of an evil world. It's a delightful, funny performance, but one that is countered too rarely with the darkness and anger needed to make the satire sting. With its visual flair, irreverence and stand-up comedy, it's a feelgood show that really shouldn't feel as good as it does.

With the Enlightenment came the opening of new avenues of knowledge and the thrill of scientific discovery. But what were the limits of this new knowledge? Could there be even greater discoveries beyond the limits of rational enquiry? And what possibilities for personal gain were there for the intellectual ego?

These are the questions of Goethe's Faust, a world-weary academic who is saved from despair by the Devil, offering sensual pleasure in return for his soul. In Silviu Purcarete's ravishing 100-strong promenade production for Sibiu's National Theatre 'Radu Stanca', Ofelia Popii's mercurial Mephistopheles promises much but has only spectacular fairground tricks to offer. We experience these for ourselves when we leave our seats to follow Faust beyond the stage and into a cavernous hall of fireworks, flames and lusty dancing. It's a stunning piece of large-scale theatre, which uses the aircraft hangar-like space of Ingliston to fantastic effect as towering portraits and set shift around. It's noisy, wild and spectacular, but theatre is all it is. That's why Ilie Gheorghe's Faust thinks better of it and saves his soul by suppressing his desire for egotistical gain, leaving Mephistopheles to wonder why the good guys always win.

Faust sees sense just in time, but even in the 21st century, the allure of the irrational has not left us. Just look at the popularity of horoscopes, homeopathy and books on the occult. If the Enlightenment was a battle between the new evidence-based scientific method and the old way of operating on instinct and prejudice, then it is a battle still raging.

Over on the Fringe, that's something performer Baba Brinkman knows all about. In The Rap Guide To Evolution, Edinburgh's only peer-reviewed rap show, he pulls off the unlikely feat of setting Darwin's theory of evolution to hip-hop beats, while fending off the creationist lobby and its dogmatic faith in the literal truth of the Bible.

In a blinding barrage of rhymes that find the missing link between Eminem and Richard Dawkins, the Canadian rapper turns in a brilliant gig-cum-lecture that is as educational as it is novel. v

Faith Healer, King's Theatre, September 1–5; Faust, Lowland Hall, Ingliston, run ended; Optimism, Royal Lyceum, run ended; The Rap Guide To Evolution, Gilded Balloon, until 31 August www.festivals-edinburgh.com