The Fell of Dark: The Gigli Concert

Ben Barnes

Approaching a production of The Gigli Concert, as I did in 2001 and again in 2004 at the Abbey Theatre, you become quickly aware that it operates on many levels – most accessibly as a dissection of middle-aged men in crisis but also on the level of myth as a Faustian fable which goes through several iterations and reversals.

It is in the figure of Irish Man that this juxtaposition of the familiar and the mythical is best exemplified and both must be adverted to in any attempt to grapple with the play’s multi-layered complexities. This is so for the urgent reasons that it is from the local that the actor must, perforce, construct his performance and it is out of the mythical that the director assembles the architecture of his/her production.

The bleak hinterland from which Irish Man emerges seeking deliverance is the venal world of construction in the Ireland of the 1970s and its murky interface with politics, local and national. By his own admission his fortune is built on ‘corruption, brutality, backhanding, fronthanding, backstabbing, lump labour and a bit of technology’⁷⁰⁴, and he corrects the initially slow-to-understand, JPW King’s designation of him as a builder with the more accurate soubriquet of ‘operator’.

Rising above less than promising beginnings this Irishman has built an empire and a fortune which is veritably unassailable, and when, like a conquering hero, he steps from his car with ‘beautiful nature’ all around him, he can only see ‘fine sites for development’, fresh citadels to be toppled, he thinks:

Will I build a thousand more? No, I’ve made my mind up on that one. There’s more to life than working myself to death or wheeling and dealing with that criminal band of would-be present-day little pigmy Napoleons we’ve got at the top. (224)

No longer driven (or distracted?) by the need to make more money, and disillusioned by the dishonesty and criminality he has had to rub shoulders with to reach a place of wealth and influence, Irish Man becomes acutely aware, not only of his isolation from those around him, but of a kind of spiritual emptiness. If there is, as he attests, more to life than ‘working myself to death’ what shape might that fulfilment take and how might he access it?

Here is a man washed up on the beach of middle age without a compass. He cannot begin to know the answers to his longings because he cannot even recognize the shape of the questions. In his alienation he lashes out not only at those who aggravate him but at those by whom he is loved. This sense of embattlement and barely repressed fury is spectacularly fixated on the itinerants who have camped themselves on his property, and explaining to the Englishman, JPW, what a slash hook is, he describes how he takes it up to deal with the intruders:

The place is a shit house. It’s everywhere. Why did they choose me, my territory? […] So. Went out. To kill them. But someone – the wife – called the police, and they stopped me. I would’ve killed them otherwise. No question about that. Jail – hospital mean nothing to me. Jail – hospital have a certain appeal. (174)

And this process of alienation then turns on those he loves: his wife and young son. In one of the most moving and haunting passages of the play (perhaps of any play) Irish Man describes how his wife is near nervous breakdown and how she has become bewildered by his increasingly erratic and violent behaviour, the latest manifestation of which is directed against his young son:

And I burned all his toys last night. I rooted them out of every corner. And I’m so proud of him. I see him watching me sometimes. He’s almost nine. I watch him sometimes too, secretly, and wonder will I write him a letter. Or take him for a little walk, my arm around his shoulders. Because, though he’s nearly nine, and a boy, he would still allow me to put my arm around his shoulders. My son. And explain to him that I don’t matter. That it would be better if I disappeared. (185)

His wife makes one last attempt to get through to him, at first tenderly but with increasing frustration. His impotence in the face of her appeal has all the resignation of a fatally wounded animal and the intensity of emotion he finds in the quiet telling to JPW of this nocturnal scene requires enormous skill and delicacy on the part of the actor. The technical key to its successful delivery depends – as Murphy explained to me in rehearsal once – on the repeated use of the conjunction ‘and’ and its alternate signifier as a musical rest and as a device to bridge and contain the emotion which wells up in the telling:

My wife come down last night. Nightdress, long hair. I pretended I didn’t hear her come in or that she was watching me. And I kept listening to the music. Then she come and stood beside my chair. Smiling. What are you listening to. I use the headphones at night. Elgar, I said. I don’t know why I said that because the only thing I listen to is him. And. You off I said. To bed. And she said yes, it’s ten past one heighho. And. You coming up she said. And I said, in a little, I said. And. Then she knelt down and put her head on my knees. And then she said talk to me. Talk to me, talk to me, please love talk to me. And I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. And then she said I love you so much. And I said I love you too … but not out loud. And. Then she got up. And then she said pull yourself together, what’s the matter with you, for God’s sake get a grip on yourself, pull yourself together. She was trembling. She’d let go for a moment. And then she said goodnight. When she left I stood up. Out of respect. I knew she would’ve stopped in the hall. She usually does. Just stands there for a few moments. Before going up. And. Then it come out. My roar. Fuck you, fuck you … fuck you. (Though delivered quietly and the intense emotion contained, tears have started down the IRISH MAN’s face during the speech.) (185-86, italics added for ‘And’)

Of course, it is not Elgar he is listening to. It is the great Italian tenor, Beniamino Gigli and all that sense of loss and longing which Irish Man feels, the utter absence of beauty in his comfortable but brutalized world, a life as loveless as a 1970s Irish bungalow, is crystallized through those dark nights of the soul spent listening to that record over and over again. It is as if this man, so powerfully present in the commercial transactions of his life, so corporeally solid, has been otherwise invisible to himself and to those around him. He might be Beckett’s Hamm in the nadir of his despair:

HAMM. Clov.

CLOV. (Absorbed) Mmm.

HAMM. Do you know what it is?

CLOV. (As before) Mmm.

HAMM. I was never there. […]

CLOV. Lucky for you.

(He looks out window)

HAMM. Absent always. It all happened without me. I don’t know what’s happened.⁷⁰⁵

In this vortex of depression and longing Murphy’s Irish Man arrives at the rooms of the similarly afflicted JPW King with the impossible quest to inhabit the world of the tenor and to sing like Gigli. It is here the Faustian pact is made and the mythical architecture of the drama becomes manifest: ‘I’d give my life for one short sweet hour to be able to sing like that.’ (210)

Not that in JPW King we have what could be described as a cool Mephistophelian genius; he is no genie waiting to grant three wishes for the price of a soul. He would find no obvious place in the pages of Goethe or the score of Gounod. By a different route he has washed up at the same place of despair as the man he is hired to help. In words directly echoed by Irish Man later in the play, JPW opens with the line, ‘Christ, how am I going to get through today?’ (166), a sentiment distinctly at odds with the self-help business he advertises with the mantra ‘anything is possible’. (168)

If Irish Man has alienated himself from his society, JPW King is a de facto alien, hailing from the neighbouring island. In an era when the country was racked by the dark deeds perpetrated in the name of Irish republicanism, King represents that most ambivalent of figures, the upper middle-class, educated Englishman in Ireland. He scans as a vestigial remnant of a type so gloriously alive in the pages of Molly Keane or Elizabeth Bowen or J.G. Farrell, and in that end-of-the-line inability to make something of himself he recalls the endearing, but hopeless, Casimir from the Aristocrats of Brian Friel: an association made all the more vivid for me by virtue of the fact that the same actor, Mark Lambert, played both Casimir and JPW King in productions which I directed at The Gate and the Abbey respectively.

Echoing a prejudice as old as the Song of Dermot and the Earl, Irish Man notes ‘you’re a stranger here, Mr King?’, to which JPW (understanding) replies: ‘Well I have been here for nearly – five years? I mean to say.’ And Irish Man persists: ‘But you’re a stranger, you’re English?’ (170) This diffident Englishman, JPW King, presides in the eyrie of his adopted city as the lone representative of a defunct consciousness expanding the ‘organization’ whose leader, one ‘Steve’, has long since fled the country under some unnamed cloud of scandal which is never specified but clearly implied when JPW recoils from the depth of Irish Man’s despair:

Ah, Mr … I’m out of my depth. This organization, Steve, our founder, leader, came over to set up this office. Though I have always wanted to achieve something, I couldn’t do even that much on my own. They sent me over here. But even they have forgotten me. And I have forgotten them. I think it is likely they shipped Steve back to the States. I do not even know if we are still in existence. (186)

JPW on the promise of a generous fee, and out of the depths of his own loneliness and despair, gamely takes Irish Man on and with the assistance of a set of utterly confusing charts, and a blitz of incomprehensible gobbledegook jargon delivered with increasingly manic energy, he explains the processes of ‘de-stratification’ which must be undergone to arrive at a state of ‘nihil’ out of which a new persona can be created. In parallel with this he researches the chemical cocktail that might enable Irish Man to achieve his mad goal: to sing like Gigli. Either that or it will kill him.

It is not a promising scenario, but Irish Man keeps returning, partly because he recognizes in JPW a fellow traveller, unlikely as that may on first sight seem, and partly because he has nowhere else to go. Slapping the money down on the table he warns JPW:

IRISH MAN. Noon tomorrow! And you had better be here! Do you understand that? […]

JPW. You bring the pistols! I shall bring the booze! (189)

Instead of pistols Irish Man comes armed with his record and his record player and the soaring incandescence of Gigli’s rendition of ‘Dai campi, dai prati’, tellingly from the opera Mefistofele, succeeds, in that one playing, in sweeping all JPW’s faux psycho-babble to one side and the two men, all pretence gone, huddle around the record player as if around a two-bar electric fire, lay waste the bottle of vodka which JPW has supplied and open their hearts to one another.

It is in this sequence we learn that JPW has his own unattained and unattainable dream, his love and pursuit of his ‘Helen’ over four bleak and fruitless years. Here, as with the Faustian leitmotif, the classical parallels echoing Homer and Virgil abound – ‘a present of a locket was not going to be of much use in this case’ (206), but what becomes quickly apparent is that JPW’s longing is not for a Helen of Troy but for that heady combination of sexual fulfilment and domestic security that has always eluded him: ‘Yes. Beauty: a shy, simple, comely, virtuous, sheltered, married maiden.’ (205)

But – the history continues – it was not to be: ‘This simple married maiden was proving to be a combination of flirtatious seductive behaviour which, having aroused me, instantly turned to resistance and rejection.’ (206) His pursuit, however, was nothing if not ardent and persistent, though it ended in the bathos and comedy of a final encounter in a car park:

A hurried meeting: she had even forgotten to take off her apron which I glimpsed beneath her overcoat and which tugged strangely at my heart-strings. She said you are a remarkable man and goodbye. Do not regret it, she said, but you must, you must forget me. (207)

Irish Man counters with his fictionalized account of his pursuit of a telephonist in the guise of his hero Gigli. His prose aria, ‘Her name was Ida’, perfectly scored to the music of Toselli’s Serenade, is a masterpiece of conflation and the comic highlight of the play. The fact that JPW’s pursuit of his Helen is every bit as impossible as Irish Man’s determination to sing like Gigli is not lost on us, even though JPW fails to appreciate the irony when he retorts, ‘my story is about a real live living person, your story is bullshit.’ (210)

Whatever about that, we have arrived by act’s end (we decided on an interval after the third movement⁷⁰⁶ in our 2001 production) with the frank acknowledgement of longing and unfulfilment from two middle-aged men with the wreckage of the years behind them and the desolation of their mortality staring them in the face. And the Faustian pact driving them on to some half-remembered or half-glimpsed notion of perfection or fulfilment. In a religious sense it might be given as ‘grace’. Grace, that is, as the great American novelist Joyce Carol Oates describes it: ‘a moment of insight. A moment of beauty, and purity […] a sudden swift aerial view. We’re lifted up out of ourselves, like out of clay pots and we see. In an instant, we know.’⁷⁰⁷ What does Yeats say? ‘Before I am old/ I shall have written him one/ Poem maybe as cold/ And passionate as the dawn.’⁷⁰⁸ And here from Irish Man: ‘One short sweet hour with her, you said, and you’d give your life: I’d give my life for one short sweet hour to be able to sing like that.’ (210)

This new-found camaraderie and sense of common purpose sets the play up for the emotional climax of the fourth movement. Wild with anguish Irish Man bursts through the door next morning with the declaration, ‘She’s gone, gone, gone, left me!’ (212) But JPW is in no mood for these ‘bull in a china shop’ tactics:

Now it is Sunday morning and you arrived – what? – three hours early and, great lapsed church-going people that we are, half of this city is still sensibly in its bed. But you have got me up and double-time or not, I want something more for my endeavours, so … Yes! Sex, if you please. (214)

There follows Irish Man’s comical account of his first sexual encounter but it is in the reporting of this back to his brother Danny that we discover the brutality of his upbringing and the mindless thuggery of his elder brother, Mick, who in loco parentis decided that Danny was the one to ‘be put through school, educated’. But, he tells us, ‘I don’t think school suited our Danny’ (215), and the domestic tension resulting from this failure led to many a savage beating of the hapless but hardened Danny. To Irish Man, who was younger, Danny offered the advice that ‘when I got big, if I was ever in a fight with Mick, to watch out, that Mick would use a poker. I suppose he knew he’d never be able for Mick, unless he shot him, or knifed him.’ And on foot of this revelation, ‘He used to tell me never trust anyone, and that everything is based on hate.’ (216)

So, it happened on this particular occasion, following a particularly savage beating, that Danny was indoors crying and Irish Man was aimlessly picking buttercups off a patch of grass outside in the garden. He goes indoors:

I still had this little bunch of flowers. In my hand. I don’t think I gave a fuck about the flowers. A few – daisies, and the – yellow ones. But Danny – he was eighteen! – and he was inside, crying. And it was the only thing I could think of (He is only just managing to hold back his tears) And. And. I took the fuckin’ flowers to our Danny … wherever he is now … and I said, which do you think is nicest? The most beautiful, yeh know? And Danny said ‘Nicest?’, like a knife. ‘Nicest? Are you stupid? What use is nicest?’ Of what use is beauty, Mr King? (216-17)

I have given an account of rehearsing this scene with the actors and Tom Murphy in my book Plays and Controversies⁷⁰⁹ but even now, battle-scarred old dog for the hard road that I am, I cannot read that passage with any kind of equanimity. The breakdown in Irish Man which follows these revelations is shocking in its ferocity and after he falls asleep with exhaustion, JPW watches over him tenderly throughout the day as the music segues from the Agnus Dei to ‘Cangia, cangia tu voglie’, by Fasola.

We feel by now in our journey through the play that a trust has built up between the two men and that Irish Man, in going back to the source of his pain and suffering, will finally free himself to reach out again to his wife and child and begin to see and feel the simple beauty in the world as exemplified so agonizingly for him, in his destitution, by the pure sound of the tenor’s voice. And then some-thing extraordinary happens.

Irish Man comes to his desensitized senses again and as his depression lifts he disowns his earlier revelations and rather pathetically (not to mention hilariously) makes a case for having had a happy childhood, blaming JPW for tricking him into saying things which he now regrets. When JPW expresses his scepticism at this return to the macho tactics of the earlier scenes, Irish Man rounds on him claiming that JPW’s ministrations have had little to do with his ‘recovery’, that these bouts of depression are recurrent and on previous occasions he has cured himself:

Last time I just went away and hid in a corner – you learn a lot from animals – like a dog in a corner, you couldn’t prise me out of it, and stayed there licking my wounds till I cured myself. […] The time before, boy, I went into your territory, debauchery, Mr King: got a dose of the clap in the course of the treatment, but I cured myself. (224-25)

Not content with reasserting his own image as a solid family man, an Irish Man, a man of the community he, with a brutality worthy of his hated brother Mick, must demolish the fragile ego of his erstwhile friend and saviour – the Stranger, the one who can’t keep a woman, the man without a house, the man without substance and into the bargain a ‘Charlatan, quack, parasite! And, yeh know, there’s a stink in this pig-sty: you’d be better off cleaning it up.’ (225)

So, it is left to JPW to complete the journey alone and to slay all his own dragons single-handedly. Once the illusion of his Helen begins to evaporate he latterly comes to appreciate that his occasional lover Mona, whom he has dismissed as ‘someone I met in a supermarket’ (208) is, in fact, the love of his life only to discover that she is suffering from an illness from which there is no recovery. In not flinching from that, or from his other shortcomings, it is JPW who finally achieves that transformative moment. It is he, and not Irish Man, who finally – in a Catholic sense – is transfigured by his suffering and freed to sing like Gigli.

Returning the play to its governing mythology, however, it is Mephistopheles, in the absence of Faust, who becomes Faust himself and sees his pact through to its conclusion. Looking for help in his quest to sing JPW looks first to the heavens, to God, and then has a change of mind: ‘Rather not. You cut your losses on this little utopia of greed and carnage some time ago, my not so very clever friend. (To the floor.) You, down there! Assist please. In exchange –’ (239)

And after that catharsis he looks forward to a ‘rebirth of ideals, return of self-esteem, future known’ (239), and this resolution in turn allows him to finally leave that garret and engage again with the world, in the sober words of the poet Thomas Kinsella, ‘not young and not renewable, but man’.⁷¹⁰

But before he goes he sets the record on repeat and opens the windows to the rooftops and the sky and delares his faith anew: ‘Do not mind the pig-sty, Benimillo … mankind still has a delicate ear … That’s it … that’s it … sing on forever … that’s it.’ (240)

The ambition of The Gigli Concert which takes inspiration from, and measures itself against, the operatic and sacred music of the nineteenth century, its baroque structure and its mythical echoes and sub-structure, locates it in a great European tradition stretching back to Goethe and beyond. At the same time its ‘domestic’ locus as a thrilling drama of middle-aged men in crisis makes a compelling case for its inclusion as one of the cornerstone Irish dramas of the twentieth century. Those pillars also include The Playboy of the Western World, The Plough and the Stars and Translations, but for the ambition of its structure, the beauty of its writing and the sheer breadth of its compassion, The Gigli Concert is, arguably, the greatest of these.

Extract From: ‘Alive in Time’: The Enduring Drama of Tom Murphy: New Essays, edited by Christopher Murray (2010)

Cross Reference: Abbey Theatre

See Also: Plays and Controversies: Abbey Theatre Diaries 2000-2005, by Ben Barnes