She's no heeler, but Greg's pup has helped with Faith Healer

So many theatres featuring so many families is hardly a rare concept as siblings, parents and cousins clamber onstage while aunts and uncles cobble together costumes or rig up all the stage gear and lighting.

Not many families get to involve their dog, but Greg McLeod does things a little different. It could be said that Maisie, a one-year-old Cavador (cavalier crossed with a labrador), helps Greg learn his lines.

And in Faith Healer, starting at Workshop Theatre on November 6, he has some lines to learn – not one but two monologues of 25 minutes each. In an Irish accent, thanks, Greg, while you're at it.

"I use the same basic technique – I record myself reading the lines slowly, and as I walk the dog, I listen to a 30-second block over and over on a loop until I could remember all the lines," he said. "Once I could get to the end of those 30 seconds before my recorded self, reciting my lines with no mistakes, I'd move on to the next 30-second block."

Covering about a minute's worth of script in an hour, Greg found it worked, mumbling to himself as he walked along East Corrimal dog beach and worrying his fellow dog-walkers "must think I'm deranged".

Greg plays Frank Hardy, an itinerant faith healer who travels through villages with wife Grace and manager Teddy. Each recounts their version of events in the play, presenting overlapping and contradictory memories of love, faith, failure, and redemption.

The work explores the fragility of truth, the burden of belief, and the thin line between miracle and delusion.

Such a prose-heavy task almost dissuaded him from auditioning but he feels everything was memorised (with Maisie's help, of course) five weeks before opening night. A family friend from Dublin recorded himself reading each of the two monologues, giving Greg guidance way beyond Maisie's gift of motivation.

Greg regularly glows in lead roles and was able to display his comedic chops this year with the Arcadians in the (yes, line-heavy) role of Mortimer in Arsenic & Old Lace, stumbling into bodies lying around his batty aunts' old mansion. Two years ago, he was able to deploy his none-too-shabby singing talents as Captain Von Trapp in an Arcadians production of The Sound of Music. He trained to sing opera, becoming fluent in Italian, which he studied to find out what he was singing about.

According to Faith Healer director Peter Scrine, Greg is bringing a "wonderful intelligence and complexity to the role" of Frank.

"We're working on that delicate balance between Frank the performer, who can command an audience, and Frank the man, who is never entirely sure whether he believes in himself," Peter said.

Peter's wife, the experienced Juliet Scrine, plays Grace, Frank's long-suffering companion. "Grace is perhaps the emotional heart of the play," Peter said. "What Juliet brings is a real emotional honesty. We're exploring not simply Grace's suffering, but her intelligence, humour, strength and the complicated reasons she remains connected to Frank."

Colin Coakes plays Teddy, Frank's manager. "Colin has a terrific instinct for character and timing, and Teddy gives him an opportunity to use both," Peter said.
"The three actors bring quite different energies into the rehearsal room, which is exactly what the play needs.

"One of the most interesting things we've been doing in rehearsals is examining the events that appear in more than one character's account. Rather than trying to reconcile their different versions, we're deliberately making those contradictions clearer. Each actor has to believe absolutely in their own character's truth.

"It's a small cast, but it's an enormous emotional undertaking."

For his part, Peter was drawn to direct Faith Healer because "it doesn't offer easy answers", he said.

"It leaves you questioning what you've heard, what you believe, and whether the truth is ever quite as straightforward as we'd like it to be.

"I've always been drawn to theatre that challenges an audience, that asks them to think and feel rather than simply sit back and be entertained. And Faith Healer does that in a particularly extraordinary way.

"What fascinated me as a director was the structure. There are four monologues, delivered by three characters, and yet the dramatic tension between them is enormous. Nobody speaks directly to anyone else, but their relationships are constantly present. Each character tells us their version of events, and just when we think we understand what happened, someone else comes along and changes everything.

"It's also a play that demands enormous trust in the actors. There's nowhere to hide."

Peter mentioned that collaborating with David Thomas of Coledale, the set designer, had been particularly rewarding.

"We wanted something atmospheric and evocative, a space that feels as though it might exist somewhere between memory and reality.

"The set isn't simply a backdrop. It's part of the storytelling. David has a wonderful ability to translate an abstract idea into something theatrical, and we've worked closely to create an environment that gives the actors room to inhabit these memories while allowing the audience's imagination to do much of the work."

Faith Healer is on from 6-21 November at Wollongong Workshop Theatre, 190 Gipps Rd, Gwynneville. Buy tickets here.