How Tom Murphy’s great play speaks to the stages of my life

I OFTEN repeat to myself a version of the words “that you are breathing now, this moment, alive in time, at the same time as I, and that I can only hold my breath at the thought,” writes Victoria White.

It’s among the handful of sentences from literature to which I’ve clung for guidance and it’s been stuck in my mind since I first saw Tom Murphy’s play, The Gigli Concert, in the Abbey Theatre in 1983.

I had just started studying English at college, but I never had the money for the theatre. I don’t know why I went to that show and I don’t remember being with anyone. I don’t remember anything except the play.