The Gigli Concert Play Analysis

Analysing The Gigli Concert and Translations
Name: Marina Sanchez Elvira
Student Number: 115122492
Module: Irish Contemporary Writing (EN 3075)
Lecturer: Eibhear Walsh
22. October. 2015

DECLARATION:
I declare that the content of this assignment is all my own work. Where the work of others has been used to argument my assignment, it has been referenced accordingly.

“The Gigli Concert is concerned with a search for aesthetic fulfilment while Translations laments the destruction of an authentic Gaelic culture and the ramifications for a violent present. Discuss.”

This paper is going to deal with two plays: Translations by Brian Friel and The Gigli Concert by Tom Murphy. Both of them talk about the relationship between

But they are also different: Murphy places his work in the West of Ireland in his theatrical writing.
One of Murphy’s theories as a writer was that the West of Ireland was deprived and filled with survival guilt. The Gigli Concert is about the world of art in a world burdened by post-Famine. "The play can be read on many different levels, e.g. as a modern version of the Faust legend with an inversion of traditional Christian beliefs. Or as a play dealing with man's obsession to be 'whole', to be 'cured'". (Niel, 1992, 99).
One of the three main characters in the play, the Irishman, wants JPW to teach him how to sign like Beniamino Gigli. This is a manifestation of the Irishman's obsession. One of the traits of Gigli's voice is that it expresses the emotions that the Irishman rejects and represses. The Irishman is going to appropriate Gigli's history to his won: he is going to dress up like him; compare his life to the singer's, etc.
The play is fused with Gigli's voice; it’s the voice that the Irishman longs to imitate. Music is also one of the central metaphors. It is the desire to sore, to transcend, and to loose the past. But also to occupy the emotional freedom that Gigli's voice suggests and

They both deal with colonisation and post-colonisation. But both authors cannot help but return to the archetypes of the Irish literature tradition. They don't abandon the forms, the preoccupations, the images; they take them back and remake them for themselves. These were writers at odds with their country. They were aware of the tradition of their past but, at the same time, they were oppressed by it. They wanted to re-make it, re-appropriate it to what they were living. So they wrote Cultural Nationalism to create this new Irish