Theatre - The Gigli Concert

Gate Theatre, Dublin

It’s rare you see a classic play rendered as perfectly as this. Tom Murphy’s masterpiece about the soul and its greatest conduit — the human voice raised high in song — has to be delivered at the right pitch if it’s to reach the soaring crescendo to which it builds.

Fortunately, in the hands of a majestic cast and an appropriately ‘dynamic’ director, David Grindley, this production is a genuine delight.

The narrative centres on the relationship between a gruff Irish developer (Denis Conway) and his quack therapist, the self-styled ‘dynamatologist’, JPW King (Declan Conlon). It’s a play full of potential but what Murphy does with it is typically daring and immensely moving. Suffering from depression, the developer enlists King not to cure him, but with a more daunting request still: to help him sing like the Italian tenor Gigli.

Tom Murphy's masterpiece The Gigli Concert opens TONIGHT! Tickets from €25 http://t.co/yioVLXdk1N pic.twitter.com/cttK81Wrdo

— Gate Theatre (@GateTheatreDub) May 26, 2015

King — a washed-up, hard-boozing, misfit intellectual whose credo is that ‘anything is possible’ — takes up the challenge. What unfolds from there is a pure theatrical joy. The therapist, it transpires, is as unhinged as his patient. Where the latter is suffering from a transient mania, the sensitive dynamatologist is manic by default, a man who has “strayed too far from the world”.

Their volatile sessions are thunderously funny, but their sadness is searing, as is the poignant delirium of a young bed-hopping woman (Dawn Bradfield) with whom King is involved.

By the end, the voice of Gigli — at once the symptom and the cure — will provide for them, and for us, some bruised, bittersweet salvation.

Final Preview tonight! All tickets €20 #TheGigliConcert #TomMurphy http://t.co/1Wj3bhySQG BOOK NOW! pic.twitter.com/1MqNwWxr0r

— Gate Theatre (@GateTheatreDub) May 25, 2015

Fuelled by sheer spirit and energy, the raw material of theatre, and with Conlon and Conway in imperious form, this is nothing short of a tonic.

Until June 27