The Gigli Concert

By Tom Murphy

The Gigli Concert by Tom Murphy was the first production staged by Druid in the newly refurbished Druid Lane Theatre in July 2009 as part of Galway Arts Festival.

A magnificent starburst of language, ideas and stage trickery.

One of the sell-out hits of that year’s Galway Arts Festival, Druid played Cork and returned to Galway’s Town Hall Theatre following the Festival with their stunning production of this searching, challenging and funny play by Tom Murphy. Widely regarded as Murphy’s masterpiece, the play deals with seven days in the relationship between Dynamatologist JPW King, a quack self-help therapist living in Dublin but born and brought up in England, and the mysterious Irishman, a despairing property magnate who seeks out King to help him sing like the great Italian opera singer Beniamino Gigli.

A play of yearning and possibility, of despair and hope and about both the fragility and the endurance of the human spirit. The Gigli Concert has been described as “one of the greatest Irish plays of the century” (The Irish Times), and is a play that speaks perhaps even more to us today than when it was first staged in 1983.