Tao of Glass is an astonishing piece of theatre. It seeks to explore the minimalist, meditational music of Philip Glass, which has become celebrated in concert halls and opera houses around the world.
So how do you give tangible form to music – and the thoughts and life stance which may lie behind it? It’s a whodunnit of ideas.
The question is pursued with the lightest, humorous touch by the actor, writer and co-director Phelim McDermott. When the show begins, a spotlight falls not on the circular stage but on a member of the audience in the front row. He looks bemused and somewhat embarrassed.
After the man has shuffled onto the stage, we realise that he’s an actor pursuing his own problem of how to shift from being a mere spectator to The Man who will give the Performance? He is duty bound to inform and entertain us.
Phelim McDermott is assisted by a group of musicians and a separate band of puppeteers. There are pianos of all sizes and flimsy sheets of music, which flutter into the air and form many varied shapes, like the music in our heads, the songs and tunes and chords that hover above our physical bodies.
Tao of Glass
McDermott begins by describing his passion for theatre when he was a child and the celebrities that he watched from the gods in a Manchester playhouse. He developed the ambition that he too would become a great Shakespearian actor in the mould of Lawrence Olivier. And then he describes the complete terror of his first professional performance, the sense that he would never be able to command an audience.
The story segues into the actor’s teenage obsession with the music of Philip Glass and then a doomed attempt to create an opera with the composer, based on the surreal children’s book the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak (author of Where the Wild Things Are.)
At this point we enter a child’s world, where dreams and hallucinations and mental adventures can’t be separated from reality. A puppet of a young boy appears, which seems to represent the actor’s innocent and unfiltered imagination.
The anecdotes and themes pile onto each other, to a continual soundtrack of Philip Glass’s specially composed score. We encounter Lao Tsu and the I Ching. We hear how a potter dropped his finest vase and the fragments were mended with the first example of kintsugi, a kind of golden glue. The repaired, imperfect object becomes more valuable than the original.
We follow McDermott into a flotation tank. After 55 minutes of confused boredom, he has a revelation: he slides through the clutter of his thoughts and everyday problems to a deeper world of dreams, a surreal reality. Finally he falls further to a still point he calls the essence.
Tao of Glass
McDermott pulls off the trick of acting the clown, a character who constantly fails in his high ambitions and has to keep appealing to the audience for support and understanding. But he has established a link to the musical soundtrack, slowly unravelling chords that indicate a path to a deeper reality.
He describes a creative session with his hero, Philip Glass, when they are struggling to complete a project. “Where does your music come from?” asks the actor. The composer says something like: “You just keep writing. You have to keep putting logs on the fire. But at the end you will always get stuck, hit a block.”
“What do you do then?” asks McDermot. The answer comes: “You have to throw on the last log, which is yourself.”
The show spirals on, with the actor and his child puppet pursuing the impossible question of where music comes from and what it means – through slapstick, mime and absurdity.
The thread that binds the ten meditations together is the image of the young actor inside a cupboard on stage, dreading the moment when the doors will be flung open and he must perform.
I am no scholar of Taoism. But in this extraordinary piece of metaphysical entertainment the actor, hamstrung by self-doubt, learns to live with uncertainty, not really knowing what he’s doing, willing at last to give up his urge to control: and thus he is able to give his performance.
This musical drama runs at Sohoplace Theatre in London until September 12th, 2026.