The Gigli Concert is a play by Irish playwright Tom Murphy

Tom Murphy (playwright)

Tom Murphy is an Irish dramatist who has worked closely with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and with Druid Theatre, Galway. He was born in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland...

 premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1983 and widely regarded as his masterpiece.

Plot

The Gigli Concert deals with seven days in the relationship between Dynamatologist JPW King, a quack

Quackery

Quackery is a derogatory term used to describe the promotion of unproven or fraudulent medical practices. Random House Dictionary describes a "quack" as a "fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" or "a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, knowledge, or...

 self-help therapist living in Dublin but born and brought up in England, and the mysterious Irishman, a construction millionaire who asks King to teach him how to sing like the Italian opera singer Beniamino Gigli

Beniamino Gigli

Beniamino Gigli was an Italian opera singer. The most famous tenor of his generation, he was renowned internationally for the great beauty of his voice and the soundness of his vocal technique. Music critics sometimes took him to task, however, for what was perceived to be the over-emotionalism...

.

As King finds himself reluctantly drawn into to the Irishman's request it becomes clear that his subject is mentally unbalanced but, against all expectations, King finds himself able to heal the Irishman and, in the process, himself. Although he rises to the challenge and, indeed, becomes obsessed with it, the Irishman ends up ending the process, finding himself cured of his mental and emotional malady through King's kindness.

Left alone, and discovering that his lover, Mona, is suffering from cancer, King tries to kill himself but, in a stunning coup de theatre, instead finds himself miraculously able to sing an aria of Gigli himself. The play ends with King waking up after his suicide attempt and realising that the world is somewhere he is willing to fight on in.

Themes

A magnificent starburst of language, ideas and stage trickery The Gigli Concert grapples with huge themes of mental illness, healing and, as ever with Murphy, the defeat of nihilism through the creative relationships between human beings. Against the odds King finds his life rejuvenated by his bizarre and semi-comic relationship with his patient. Murphy has said that the play's genesis came from his frustrated desire to sing opera and, in many ways, the play can be summarised as being about the ability of human beings to achieve the impossible almost by accident.

See also

• Conversations on a Homecoming
  Conversations on a homecoming
  Conversations on a Homecoming is a 1985 play by Irish playwright Tom Murphy. Premiered by the Druid Theatre Company, Galway, Ireland in a production directed by Garry Hynes. As one of the great Irish plays set in a pub, its influence can be seen in more recent plays such as The Weir by Conor...
  
  
• The Sanctuary Lamp
  The Sanctuary Lamp
  The Sanctuary Lamp is a play by Irish playwright Tom Murphy written in 1975 but revised for subsequent productions. When premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin its anti-Catholic stance caused enormous controversy with its author denounced in pulpits up and down the country...
  
  
• Tom Murphy (playwright)
  Tom Murphy (playwright)
  Tom Murphy is an Irish dramatist who has worked closely with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and with Druid Theatre, Galway. He was born in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland...
  
  
• A Whistle In The Dark
  A Whistle In the Dark
  A Whistle in the Dark is a play by Tom Murphy that premiered in 1961 at the Theatre Royal Stratford East London having been rejected by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It then went on to be a West End hit. Murphy was twenty-five years old at the time...