Spectacular stage performances, awesome new albums, a host of fantastic films and stunning art shows - they are all featured in our critics' picks of the best of theatre, music, film and art. 

Our experts have explored all the options for culture vultures to get their teeth into, and decided on the plays, albums and movies that are well worth dedicating your weekend to.    

Read on to find out what to see and do...

THEATRE

SHOW OF THE WEEK

Faith Healer 

Rating:

You need an ear for the music of language to be seduced by the Irish playwright Brian Friel. If you are in possession of such a lyrical auricle, Theanex Erfahrungen the latest iteration of his three-person monologue Faith Healer, starring Declan Conlon, Justine Mitchell (Derry Girls) and Nick Holder, is as hypnotic and resonant as any I've seen — or heard.

The tale of itinerant showman Frank Hardy, drifting through Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the Sixties and Seventies, is all the better for being cast without big names. It allows the play to sing without reputations getting in the way. And it allows us to imagine the ‘thick fingers and black nails' of the men who are Hardy's nemeses — as well as the car he remembers as being ‘sluggish under their weight'.




Declan Conlon's Frank Hardy is an evasive, hollowed-out quack with a messiah complex and guilty conscience, who can't decide if he's gifted or a fake

Conlon's Hardy is an evasive, hollowed-out quack with a messiah complex and guilty conscience, who can't decide if he's gifted or a fake. Either way, he's run out of road and in today's censorious world is a charismatic predator, fostering the dependency of his wife Grace (Mitchell) and the loyalty of his manager Teddy (Holder).

Everything about Hardy is in need of tidying up — except his peaty voice. The faded glory of his black three-piece suit, the forgotten hair and beard sprouting rogue shoots, are all redolent of a man you'd sling 50p for a pint. And yet Conlon's disreputable mountebank is also at peace with himself after a lifetime eluding his own judgment.



The persistence of Grace's bitter faith is remarkable, too. Addressing us as if in an AA meeting, she seeks to account for her love of her husband — despite his boorish neglect and her tragic miscarriages. Mitchell's Omagh brogue is somewhere between a wobble and a crack, and she drops the odd wistful smile into Grace's heart-stopping confessions.

The show's biggest surprise, though, is Holder. He plays the normally mousey Teddy as a Falstaffian circus barker — while also whispering his fears and uncertainties about Hardy and Grace, while draining half a dozen bottles of beer.

Director Rachel O'Riordan has created a buzz about Hammersmith's Lyric which had, for years, been punching below its weight. And although an arty back wall of peeling paint is slightly at odds with the more Presbyterian setting of wooden table and chairs in Colin Richmond's design, this is a fine and darkly melodious piece of work.

Patrick Marmion

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London. Until April 13, 2hrs 30mins


 


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