Lost souls' saving grace

The revered Irish writer Tom Murphy devises the weirdest of challenges and encounters for The Gigli Concert's opening scene. A middle-aged builder visits the Dublin offices of JPW King, a glib practitioner of some esoteric brand of therapy, and demands he be helped to sing like Gigli.

King promises to achieve the impossible dream within six sessions. This may sound like the prelude to a farcical comedy of deceptions, pitting a charlatan against a gullible obsessive. It proves, however, a deeper, more significant affair.

Premiered at Dublin's Abbey theatre in 1983 and revived at the Almeida in 1992, this drama of two lost souls desperate to find fulfilment and happiness in lives without purpose now finds its ideal location in the voyeuristic intimacy of the Finborough.

Gavin McAlinden's production makes it feel as if you are snooping on a therapy session a few feet away from you. This, though, is no conventional therapeutic encounter. Vicki Fifield's design, a grubby office littered with empty bottles of alcohol and crammed with books, not to mention a couch on which Paul McGann's handsome, dishevelled King likes to sprawl, suggests the distressed therapist himself needs treatment.

Murphy satirises our belief in the integrity of the psychotherapeutic process by displaying the love-lorn King as such an unstable practitioner of it. Yet the man's vulnerability becomes his and the play's strength. The belligerence of Niall Buggy's wily, smart-suited Irishman fades as King bares his breaking heart. The men exchange confidences about themselves in a mutual intimacy and candour that helps rescue them from despair. A transference occurs. They cure each other.

Although the over-discursive Murphy shoots out too many ideas and fails to embody them in a dramatic action, the performances never fail. McGann's King, adrift on waves of narcissistic desolation or resisting Catherine Cusack's smitten married woman, and Buggy's volatile builder with his artistic aspirations, are just riveting. The two men play these life-casualties with a dynamism and emotional spontaneity that is rare to our stage.

Until 23 April. Information: 0870 400 0838.

The Gigli Concert