Growing Gigli

An incarnation of a tale as tightly wound as Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert – a vodka-drenched comedy of despair and drama, a quack psychologist, a mysterious Irishman, and the desire to sing like the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli – serves as a signature piece in the O'Punksky's Theatre repertoire. This'll be the fourth and final production of the play for director John O'Hare and fellow O'Punkskians Patrick Dickson and Maeliosa Stafford, who first staged Murphy's play at the Old Fitz in 1998.

“What do you need to create great theatre?” asks O'Hare. “We all know deep in our hearts what creates great theatre, and the two ingredients that Stanislavski distilled it down to was time and ensemble.”

He laments that all too often a production will come to an end just as new doors are being opened and new discoveries unearthed between the cast and the text – a fate he's managed to avoid with O'Punksky's.

“By the time you're in the final week of a production you're beginning to feel like an ensemble for the first time, and it always feels slightly like a missed opportunity. But when you've got a core group of artists that have the same desire to create work you come back because you've got the ensemble, and over the 15 years of the life of O'Punksky's we've got the time, and we can take the time. There's this unwritten, unspoken connection that we've evolved over time, and you start with that, you know, you start a rehearsal, first day, with that history, and all that comes out in the work.”

His returns to The Gigli Concert in familiar company, the O'Punksky's ensemble has been allowed to grow up to and into the play, picking up as they left off, armed with more experience and yet more questions each time.

“It's maturing with age: you're finding things about each other and about the characters in the play on other levels because you're bringing in deeper levels of personal experience. You know the work in a totally different way, because you're not coming to it afresh, but you are, because you're older.

“I was 39 when I started rehearsal on The Gigli the first time, and I turned 40 on the set on the closing night. The cast and crew, we all set on the set and had a drink to me and then we did the bump-out. And now I'm 54 and I'm sitting in the rehearsal room and I'm the same age as the characters. When I was 40 I was trying to imagine what it would be like to feel like they feel, it was an imaginary exercise, and one of research, but not of deep personal knowledge.

“And I'm sitting there listening to these characters speaking, and the main character's in the throes of questioning his life, why he does what he does, where he's at, is exactly how I feel. I'm now exploring my own inner psyche, my own place of being as I'm working on a work of art.”