THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Writer, co-director & performer Phelim McDermott; music by Philip Glass
@sohoplace, 4 Soho Place, Charring Cross Road, W1D 3BG until September 12, 2026
This show part concert, part performance, was created by Phelim McDermott and his company Improbable Theatre and Factory International for the 2019 Manchester International Festival. McDermott, an internationally acclaimed director, is known for using multiple performance skills – puppetry, movement, music, sound and startling visuals – all of it in aid of mostly improvised work.
Tao of Glass has the feel of a memoir, albeit with a specific focus on Philip Glass, one of the most lauded composers of the 20th century, with whom McDermott became obsessed as a teenager in the 1980s. This is a love letter to Glass informed by the fact the McDermott ended up collaborating with him on some productions and becoming a friend. It’s framed around Taoist wisdom, ideas such as being open to wonder and going with the flow, and is further informed by Arnold Mindell’s inverted cone theory illustrating Deep Democracy and its different levels of reality.
If all that makes it sound like dull tutorial on a wet afternoon, it isn’t. The approach may be cerebral, but McDermott has an amiable charm and his dry Northern English wit rescues it from pretension, in a very British way. In France, there would be no apologies.
It’s still quite a self-indulgence though and at 2 hours 30 minutes it has too many longueurs and repetitions, particularly for an audience who may not be that familiar with Glass or McDermott. The latter, incidentally, begins seated in the audience and nobody notices him.
For once at a show I thought I’d welcome that Edinburgh Fringe one hour slot format. It’s essentially a monologue aided by exceptional puppeteers and musicians. Sarah Wright, Janet Etuk and Vic Llewellyn, the puppeteers, create the visual space and objects using mostly swathes of crumpled, but untearable, music scoring paper, often held together with just cellotape. The visual images are beautiful and exquisitely lit by Colin Grenfell and McDermott is an adroit performer himself, being literally the centre of all these visual concoctions. McDermott and co-director Kirsty Housley do wonders in staging these simple visual tableaux in the round where creations must then be quickly and effortlessly cleared away for the next story to begin.
The stories or more precisely the ten meditations he recounts are diverse and often rambling covering his earliest theatrical memories, a kids’ stage play Billy’s Wonderful Kettle which left a major mark on his imagination, an encounter with a master potter, his love of flotation tanks and the opportunity they provide to lose oneself, the abstruse theory of the Inverted Cone, the philosophy of Lao Tzu, his first collaborations with Glass, a treasured glass coffee table that ends up in shards and a grand piano which plays itself.
All of these are underscored by 10 new and characteristically mesmerising pieces of music by Glass, played here by a brilliant ensemble: Chris Vatalaro (MD and percussion), Katherine Tinker (piano), Jack McNeil (clarinet), Kasia Ziminska (violin), and Daniel Bradley (percussion).
The piece sets itself up to examine nothing less than the source of inspiration itself and McDermott uses Glass’s music as the springboard for this, but while that Sisyphean task may be beyond him this is an amiable meditation along the way.
