The Play Podcast - 043 - Faith Healer by Brian Friel Host: Douglas Schatz Guest: Joe Dowling The Play Podcast is a podcast dedicated to exploring the greatest new and classic plays. In each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We discuss the play’s origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing. Brian Friel’s play Faith Healer is a literary and theatrical masterpiece, acclaimed for the beauty of its language, its innovative form, and the bathetic yet tragic tale of its eponymous character and those tethered to his misfortunes. My guest, Joe Dowling, directed the seminal producation at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1980 and returned there to revive the play more than 40 years later.