First performed at Manchester International Festival in 2019, Phelim McDermott’s Tao of Glass is now playing at @sohoplace. With Philip Glass’s music at its centre, the production brings together theatrical storytelling, live music, puppetry and object theatre.
An artist’s obsession can become a work of art. As a child, Phelim McDermott listened to the same records over and over again. Years later, he created a production with the composer he had long admired. Tao of Glass begins with McDermott’s personal memories of a lifelong love of Philip Glass’s music.
Glass is an American composer known for building music from repeated phrases and subtle, gradually accumulating variations. His work includes the opera Einstein on the Beach and the score for the film The Hours. First performed at Manchester International Festival in 2019, Tao of Glass received its London premiere at @sohoplace. With Glass’s music at its centre, the production brings together theatrical storytelling, live music, puppetry and object theatre. McDermott, who wrote and co-directed the production with Kirsty Housley, tells his own story on stage alongside three puppeteers. Four musicians playing piano, violin, clarinet and percussion perform ten pieces composed by Glass especially for the production and take an active part in the action.
The production began with a project McDermott and Glass never completed. They had planned to adapt a Maurice Sendak picture book for the stage, but were unable to continue following Sendak’s death. Yet an unfinished work does not disappear from an artist’s life. Memories of the project became intertwined with McDermott’s childhood, dreams, reflections on life and death, Taoist thought, and Glass’s music. These separate fragments eventually became the material for a new production.
McDermott describes Glass’s music as a river that has flowed through his life. Following that river upstream takes him back to his childhood and his discovery of Glass’s records. He also recalls once secretly following the composer he admired. What began as the relationship between a fan and his idol gradually developed into one between two fellow artists. Through their work together on opera, McDermott began translating the music he had loved for so long into the language of theatre. Tao of Glass is also an exchange between two artists working in different forms. The composer offers new music; the director responds with the images and ideas it inspires, transforming them into theatre and offering them back. That creative conversation is the production itself.
Photo: Johan Persson
At first, Tao of Glass resembles an autobiographical monologue shaped by McDermott’s memories. He talks about his childhood and his first encounter with Glass’s music, leading us to expect a story about an artist’s development. But the narrative gradually becomes less distinct. In its place come extended passages of music, puppetry and shadow play, along with fragments of thought about dreams, life and death. Rather than allowing one event to propel the next, the production scatters pieces of memory, music, philosophy and imagery across the stage. This freedom produces moments of striking theatrical invention, but it also leaves the production feeling diffuse and at times quite slow.
The ‘Tao’ of the title, meaning ‘the Way’, offers one way into this elusive structure. Taoism values an acceptance of natural movement and change rather than forcing things in a particular direction. Similarly, the production allows memories, music and images to emerge and recede in their own time rather than following a fixed narrative path. At times, it feels as though McDermott is placing each thought on stage as it occurs to him. The title encourages us to pay attention not only to what the production says, but also to the way it moves.
McDermott offers another metaphor in kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery without concealing its fractures. During the performance, he describes how the pieces are reassembled and the cracks highlighted with gold, making the history of the breakage part of the object’s new beauty. Tao of Glass takes a similar approach. It does not attempt to disguise the joins between childhood memories, an unfinished project, dreams, death, puppetry, and music, or to shape them into a single seamless narrative. If Taoism helps us understand how the production flows, kintsugi shows us how its scattered materials come together to form a single work.
Its narrative thread can be difficult to hold on to, while some of its images feel more like accumulations than connections. Even so, the moments when McDermott transforms abstract ideas into theatrical images are striking. As the movement of bodies and objects is layered over Glass’s music, what we hear expands into something we can see on stage. Large, delicate sheets printed with musical notation cascade onto the stage and scatter in every direction. The three puppeteers gather them one by one and begin to shape them. The pages that lay scattered moments earlier gradually become the figure of Glass seated at a piano. The paper on which his music was recorded becomes the body of the person who composed it.
Elsewhere, the inside of a piano becomes the New York skyline, while paper, musical scores, puppets and human bodies continually form new landscapes. The production never conceals how these images are made, yet the transformation of familiar materials into something entirely different still feels magical. In these moments, Phelim McDermott’s theatrical imagination is at its most vivid. Just as scattered pages of music come together to create a new figure, this production has emerged from the fragments of McDermott’s life.
For an artist, neither the memory of obsessively listening to the same music as a teenager nor a project that was never completed is wasted time. McDermott’s early admiration led to his collaboration with Glass, while their unfinished work became the material for something new. Like kintsugi, the production pieces together McDermott’s memories, obsessions, and failures without concealing the joins. The result is uneven and often elusive, but at its best it transforms the fragments of an artist’s life into images of startling theatrical beauty.
Tao of Glass is playing at @sohoplace until September 12.
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