Tao of Glass

A love letter to theatre. A love letter to Philip Glass. A meditation on creativity and Taoism. There isn’t really a way to describe this show without making it sound naff or dull.

But that’s to underestimate the great Phelim McDermott who, with his company Improbable, has made some of the most extraordinary work of the last couple of decades, as well as West End hits like My Neighbour Totoro and big operas like Philip Glass's epic Akhnaten. That last one is important here, because it’s where McDermott – long a Glass lover – finally met his idol.

Tao of Glass – which premiered in Manchester in 2019 – starts with McDermott remembering what he calls the ‘ghosts of theatre’ that live within him: the memories of seeing Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney.

Then he turns this show into a kind of ghost too. McDermott was meant to work with Glass on an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, but Sendak died before it could happen. ‘There was going to be puppeteers…musicians’, says McDermott, his delivery style TED talk meets CBBC presenter with a dash of Ken Campbell eccentricity thrown in.

As he speaks, puppeteers and musicians appear. Then he tells us about a show he was meant to see as a little boy – Billy’s Wonderful Kettle – until he fell ill and couldn’t go. It became an idealised production in his head. Cue the kettle…

So we’ve got a show he didn’t see and a show he didn’t make, being made up for here with tissue paper, sellotape, puppets and music. And what a making up. In glorious Improbable style, sheets of music are scrunched into the shape of Glass himself, while torches make silhouettes that grow big and small, all under three concentric glowing rings which, in Fly Davis's design, ascend and descend in stately configurations. 

But it’s not just the playful simplicity of the stagecraft that makes this so good. It’s also the way McDermott lays little images and ideas down in his storytelling, picking them back up later in different contexts, scripting like he’s a composer playing with leitmotif. One of the nuggets might be a memory from his childhood recontextualised now he’s an adult, or a philosophical idea, or the concept of Kintsugi (mending broken pots with gold paint) or a finer point of Taoism.

It is a proselytising piece, after all. McDermott wants to explain the history and theories of Taoism – with cones of consciousness and concepts of Deep Democracy – while he weaves them around what Glass’s music has meant to him. That is occasionally a bit bloke-does-a-podcast. But its proselytising purpose is as much for theatre and music as it is for Taoism. You can’t really fail to be enchanted by what he’s doing on stage, the simple magic of it.

With that affable conversational style he has, he seems as surprised and wide-eyed as us when the tricks start coming. He has an ability to make the show feel like it’s creating itself as it goes along. And it helps that everything sounds about 70 percent more profound with Philip Glass music playing underneath.

Somehow McDermott pulls all his many strands together: broken dreams, broken pots, those famous broken chords of Glass’s music. Far from naff or dull, this is in fact a cheeky show, and a fun show, and a deeply profound show. It is a love letter to theatre, partly because of its subject, but mostly because there isn’t a single moment of it that could exist in any other form than theatre.