In an almost bare space three monologists occupy the spotlight singly, in turn, never on stage together – and between them, in Friel's beautifully crafted language, they create an absorbing, powerful, sometimes moving and sometimes shocking drama of love, ambiguity, failure, comedy, strangeness, banality, and tragedy. This is theatre at its most spellbinding. It is the old storytelling art, but evolved into something complex and increasingly deep by having the same history retold from the three different vantages of separate needs and hurts, conflicting beliefs and desires, intermittently touching registers of despair and love.
    An Irishman with a strange, sporadic, unaccountable gift as a healer earns his living by touring the more credulous Celtic backwaters of Wales and Scotland, working seedy village halls and chapels, sometimes curing ailments but oftener not – and therefore always taking care to appear for "One Night Only." He is accompanied by his wife – in his constant and shifting recreations of the truth about his life she figures mainly as his "mistress", and in his version she is almost – almost – marginal to him. He is also accompanied by his manager, an irrepressible, lonely, cheerful, failed impresario who has managed various acts including a bagpipe-playing dog. It is appropriate that the Faith Healer should have an impresario; he is an actor, and what he does is an act. Sometimes it works, perhaps because of the power of credulity and desperation among the ill, and what he recognises as their hatred for him – because by coming to him they have admitted defeat, and hopelessness.
    And when the ill and desperate, the lame and ugly and bent and hunched and crippled, come to the seedy halls in the hope of a miracle, the music played is "I love you just the way you are."
    Like water flowing with increasing, and increasingly terrifying, pace towards a cataract in the near distance, each of the three tales of love, loss and loneliness gathers speed towards an awful denouement. On the way there is deep and complicated sorrow to encounter among the stark truths and the witty insights each is capable of producing. Most poignant and crucial is the still-birth of a baby – the healer hurries away, as if a premonition tells him what is to happen – later he remembers the event as the occasion when his mother died, and he returned to Ireland to see her; but in fact his mother died many years before; and whereas his wife remembers him being present at the birth and burial of the little creature, the impresario knows that he was not there, but had escaped the tragedy by walking into the hills before it happened. This marvellous construction with its profound recognition of the truths, avoidances, hopeful lies and bitter weaknesses which make up human experience is characteristic of Friel's genius.
    With a resource as marvellous as Friel's writing you would think that the three actors had only to stand up and speak the lines to make a great drama. But the huge memory task involved in mastering each monologue, and the challenge of standing alone and making everything come from the lips with very little action and interaction to add content, demands a high level of talent. These three have it by the truckload, and gave stunning performances. Ian McDiarmid's performance justly accumulated superlatives from the broadsheet reviewers; had they seen the production mature over time, with audiences demanding a longer run and getting it, they would have seen the strength in Ken Stott's rendition grow, and alongside it the subtlety and pathos in the fine reading given by Geraldine James to the tragic figure of Grace.
    Between them Friel and the cast created wonderfully memorable theatre.
AC Grayling