Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✩✩
by Tom Murphy, directed by Nancy Palk
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
April 2-May 16, 2014
Irish Man: “You don't need to know the words: hear the sounds”
Tom Murphy’s 1983 play The Gigli Concert is considered a masterpiece in his native Ireland. In Soulpepper’s current production you can get a glimmer of how that could be true, but only if you listen to the dialogue and ignore what is happening – or rather what is not happening – when it is spoken. Murphy has written a rich, complex text about the possibility of overcoming despair. Soulpepper has supplied an excellent cast. The problem is that Nancy Palk, in only her third time directing for Soulpepper, seems not to understand the play fully and therefore does not shape the action or the performances with enough clarity. She seems to think she is directing a naturalistic drama when, in fact the play is a metaphysical comedy.
The play is set in the cluttered, shabby office-cum-apartment of JPW King (Diego Matamoros), an Englishman living in Ireland. King is a proponent of a movement called “Dynamatology”, a New-Agey life-coaching practice that sounds like a combination of psychoanalysis and Scientology. King has a faded portrait of the movement’s founder “Steve” on the wall but hasn’t been contacted by the organization for several years and doesn’t even know if it exists anymore. This kind of information should tell us that Murphy is not writing a naturalistic play. With a character like King continuing to believe in a mode of healing that may have become extinct, it should be clear that Murphy is writing about the persistence of faith rather than about lives determined by heredity and environment. (In a sidenote, Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, who knows Murphy, suggested in 2001 that “dynamatology” or the “logic of the dynamizing possible” would be a good name for his own philosophy of God.*)
Into King’s physically, socially and mentally messy life comes a dapper but mysterious man who will not give his name and is thus known in the text only as the “Irish Man” (Stuart Hughes). He is as rich, forceful and seemingly dangerous as King is poor, dithering and seemingly weak. The Irish Man is a property developer who has consulted psychiatrists about his problem and has now come to King as his last hope. He is obsessed with the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957) and wants to learn how to sing like him. He wants to sing because for him singing is the purest expression of human emotion. He also needs to sing to get himself out of the dark mood he is in that leads to bouts of violence.
At first the Man is unforthcoming about any personal details. Eventually, however, he tells King about his childhood. King, who is ignorant of opera, does not realize that the Man is not telling him about his own childhood but about Gigli’s. The fact that he says was born the son of a cobbler in Recanati, Italy, and that his brother Lorenzo became a painter might tip off some opera fans in the audience, but the mere fact that the Man never explains how or when he came from Italy to Ireland should again make us realize that the Man has as much a symbolic purpose as a realistic one. Also, that the Man insists that only King can help him, even though the Man knows King is a charlatan, should be a key to understanding that the play is a metaphysical parable.
King is in dire need of the money but is worried about accepting a client who may be a madman. In the end, the Irish Man’s extravagant offer of payment wins out and King, though he knows he is totally out of his depth, begins to think of the project of priming the Man to sing like Gigli in six sessions as an exhilarating challenge. With each session, the role of therapist and client seem to reverse. King himself is on the verge of despair and, like the Man, cannot “sing”. This appears at its most painful in King’s encounters with Mona (Irene Poole) a married woman, who picked King up to start an affair. In an unloving relationship, Mona keeps hoping that King will say he loves her, but King’s deep-seated sense of unworthiness prevents him from expressing so absolute an emotion.
Reviews of productions elsewhere, such as the Murphy retrospective that Galway’s Druid Theatre toured in 2012, refer to the verbal and spiritual struggle that takes place between the Man and King. In Soulpepper’s production, the two men’s acting styles are so different they seem to be in different plays and the tension that should mount between them never appears. Another element sorely missing is the sense of comedy. Palk has Matamoros explain the principles of Dynamatology, of “potentializing one’s potential”, as if they actually made sense. Listening to the text alone, one can tell that scene after scene is obviously set up for comedy that Palk never takes advantage of. When the Man says he read about King in the newspaper, King immediately assumes the Man is referring to a defamatory article in the past rather than simply to King’s advert. There should be laughter, but there is none.
Palk also draws out the bizarre conclusion, where a miracle may have occurred, to an ungainly length. Even if we were caught up in the final revelation that some have compared to the ending of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, its enactment here leads to tedium not elation.
The same cast would be perfect for the play, but Palk seems to have let them rely on their own resources. Matamoros gives us a variation on his Uncle Vanya and Hughes seems to be playing a 1940s gangster but without the mystery that should surround such an ominous figure. Poole’s Mona seems the truest character in the play. She does not make Mona’s confusing social situation clear, but her tale of her lost daughter and phantom goddaughter is deeply moving and we are angry that King should be too muddled to respond to it properly.
This is a highly unusual play that works according to an aesthetic that begins with apparent realism only in order to transcend it. The play demands a director with a long experience of Irish drama who can make its workings clear to us. This it does not not have. Thus a play about the possibility of achieving the impossible, about transforming despair into hope, moves forward without suspense and sadly becomes mired in unrevelatory drabness.
©Christopher Hoile
*See Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 6.
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Diego Matamoros as JPW King and Stuart Hughes as the Irish Man; Diego Matamoros and Irene Poole as Mona. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2014-04-17
The Gigli Concert