The tao of Glass: Quasi-mystical Philip Glass musing has moments of magic

Director, writer and actor Phelim McDermott’s musing on creativity and his relationship with composer Philip Glass and his music strikes me as quite beautiful, but some will find it exasperating. There’s that quasi-mystical title, for a start – “tao” meaning the way or the path – and a whole heap of associations that range from sacred texts to floatation tanks and the Japanese art of Kintsugi ceramic repair. McDermott explores his themes in a manner that’s fey, playful and leisurely – I’ve seen shorter Lears - while three puppeteer-performers manipulate scale and perspective, conjuring worlds from wispy music score sheets, figurines and props. Throughout, a deft, side-stage ensemble plays the characteristically teeming, looping, hypnotic compositions Glass wrote for this show. It’s an elusive as well as an allusive piece of work, stuffed with ideas but short on certainties. When it all coalesces, it’s magic, and arguably profound. Fundamentally it’s about acceptance – of age and death (Glass is 89, McDermott 62) and the unknowable mystery of where music comes from. A key late scene – ten minutes long and echoed again later – sees McDermott lying supine and still on the revolving stage while a Steinway smart piano plays the fingerings of the absent “ghost” composer, eventually joined by the clarinettist and violinist. I found this quietly moving though it also looks indulgent. The man next to me – a fan of Glass’s music, who knew nothing about McDermott – had already left at the interval.The Tao of Glass is also about things that didn’t happen. As a child seeing Laurence Olivier’s Shylock at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, McDermott dreamt of being a great Shakespearean. Instead, he became an intuitive improviser and deviser of stage work and a reliably oddball interpreter of others’. His diverse oeuvre includes Shockheaded Peter, My Neighbour Totoro and a Broadway Addams Family musical from which he was let go (he tells us). Tao of GlassJohan PerssonHaving used Glass’s music in his first professional show Cupboard Man (also referenced here), McDermott fudged meeting his idol for years then ended up directing three of his operas. The Tao of Glass rose from the ashes of a planned adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s surreal children’s fantasy book In the Night Kitchen that collapsed when Sendak died.This event heralds one of the more ravishing sequences. Sendak’s New York skyline, composed of kitchenware, is echoed in the hammers of a gutted piano. McDermott’s largely mute, black-clad sidekicks (Sarah Wright, Janet Etuk and Vic Llewellyn) create the boy protagonist Mickey’s journey as if it were a wordless, piano-accompanied George Méliès film from the 1900s. Mickey, initially a mannikin and then a puppet operated by Wright, becomes a proxy for McDermott’s wondering boyhood self and also his oft-quoted young son, Riddley. There are other arresting moments: a giant, paper rendering of Glass “conducting with his hair”; McDermott invoking another childhood hero, Max Wall, in Beckett, scrunches of manuscript accreting to him with sticky tape; a hat that becomes a boat. The music, sometimes complex, sometimes as simple as a scale, and fluidly driven by musical director Chris Vatalaro, is transporting. There are also endless pleasing synergies and synchronicities. McDermott created this show with Glass in 2019 for the in-the-round crucible of his early aspirations, the Royal Exchange. It fits perfectly into the similarly-arranged @sohoplace. Three concentric rings lowered from the ceiling and representing different levels of consciousness (the idea drawn from another earlier show about coma patients) also evoke the ouroboros life cycle and the circularity and repetition of Glass’s compositions. This sort of associative, free-form, seat-of-the-pants creativity is central to McDermott’s practice and it’s what makes his work so interesting. He’s an agreeable narrating presence, drily funny but not hilarious (he invested his payoff from the Addams Family in a coffee table – a “huge piece of glass” that becomes a heavy metaphor). He could buck up the pace here, perhaps drop some of the more obscure references. I hope some of you who have read this far will feel intrigued and book tickets. I’m sure others will run a mile.Read More