Brian Friel's Faith Healer (written in 1977, (1) and premiered on 5 April 1979) has earned a great deal of public acclaim and scholarly attention, and rightly sits as one of the playwright's finest works in a repertoire that is rich, long, and varied. Yet in all this time, a set of questions remains which fundamentally affects the ways in which we respond to the play. Over the years, critics have raised one fairly persistent generic issue which has never been properly resolved but which is central to the treatment of the subject matter. From Declan Kiberd's early article which asks whether the play can 'be a fully dramatic work, in any real sense of the word', via Richard Pine's view that Faith Healer is a 'non-play', to Tony Corbett's assertion that 'there appears to be little of what could be termed dramatic in the play', critics have puzzled over the very nature of the piece. (2) Yet while these critics point to the difficulties of accommodating Faith Healer under the rubric of 'drama', they do not suggest alternative paradigms or approaches. The dramaturgical problem that is implicit in all the comments is Friel's ostensibly simple form: the three characters, Frank the faith healer, Grace, his partner, and Teddy, his manager, speak exclusively in monologue and never communicate with each other. As a result, three different views of the same events emerge and none of them can be fully reconciled with the others. Karen DeVinney attempts to clarify the issue. While she prefers the genre 'prose poem', itself a refutation of the label 'drama', she argues with reference to both Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney that DeVinney's use of the words 'dramatic' and 'dramatizes' is problematic. The latter suggests that to dramatize is little more than 'to put on stage'. Later, the contradictory nature of the monologues leads DeVinney to the conclusion that 'there is no reason to accept anyone's version as the true one [...]. Their conflicts are the point'. (4) While there is certainly no resolution to the open questions of the play, the terms in which the argument is couched use the language of Aristotelian poetics, that conflicts mark the text as 'dramatic'. I should like to suggest that the dramatic in the play is something of a red herring. Critical reliance upon the term is partly due to English-language criticism grounding texts written for the theatre (with the partial exception of very recent work) as dramas. This, in turn, is perhaps because these scholars have little access to a broader, more challenging range of continental theatre-texts and theoretical positions. This essay concerns itself with reading Faith Healer under a different rubric, that of the postdramatic, which offers a range of insights that will re-read the text as one which is far more radical than previously acknowledged.
