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‘Faith Healer’ Review: Michael Sheen Stirs the Embers in the Ashes
Sep 20, 2020
The first time I ever saw Michael Sheen, he was blazing like the sun. He was 30 then, making his Broadway debut as a divinely inspired, impishly behaved Mozart in the 1999 revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus.” He gave such undiluted radiance to a young composer’s brilliance that he eclipsed everyone else onstage, and it felt almost dangerous to stare at him for too long. Two decades later — on Saturday, in fact — I watched a 51-year-old Sheen portraying another artist, an older man raking through the ashes of a career that had burned only fitfully. As Frank Hardy, the title character of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” which was streamed live from the Old Vic Theater in London , Sheen became a walking shadow, a figure whose doubts had long ago overwhelmed his gift, the dubious but occasionally transcendent art of healing the sick and the maimed by faith alone. (And make no mistake: Friel is discussing the role of the artist here.) But as the camera stared at Sheen, strutting and slinking across an empty stage before an audience of no one, you could sense the sparks in the embers. Frank is an Irish-born traveling seller of hope and a man whose talents are, to put it kindly, capricious. Sheen drew Frank in lines of darkness that never entirely hid the light that still flickered disturbingly within. And an actor I had first valued for his incandescence was now working in subtle, murky shades that paradoxically illuminated one of the greatest plays ever written about the benediction and curse of the artist’s gift.
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