5 hours ago
5
A show that doesn’t happen (and one that’s never seen); a shattered coffee table; the I Ching; Maurice Sendak; a flotation tank; Deep Democracy. Just some of the disparate fragments that are lovingly assembled by the Tao of Glass into what writer and co-director Phelim McDermott has called “a storytelling tapestry – part concert, part performance”. Premiered at 2019’s Manchester International festival, this beguiling meditation now makes its London debut – albeit without the figure who looms tousle-haired and scowling behind it: composer Philip Glass.
Glass’s music has been, McDermott explains, a “river” through his life. The award-winning director’s fascination started as a teenager, lying on his bedroom floor listening to Glassworks on repeat, later crystallised by a little light stalking (the young McDermott follows Glass through the streets of Covent Garden) and professional collaborations on the composer’s operas.
But it’s a show they never made together – an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s In The Night Kitchen, derailed by the author’s death – that becomes the catalyst for a series of theatrical vignettes for McDermott, a trio of puppeteers and quartet of musicians, each set to a specially composed piece by Glass. All coalesce around Glass’s own question: where does music come from?
For “music” read art, inspiration, life. This is theatre about theatre, a monologue that uses all the genre’s tricks and techniques to magic McDermott – initially discovered sitting in the front row – from the stalls to the stage, from childhood wonder to adult maker. If that sounds solipsistic then it fails to take into account the creative delight, the humour and joy distilled into a monologue that makes a hooded Chinese philosopher out of a sheet of manuscript paper, turns the inner mechanism of a piano into the New York skyline, and kitchen utensils into an orchestra. There’s a tear-jerker, a fourth wall in tatters, even a jump-scare. It’s all here.
Don’t expect a linear narrative. This is a homage to Glass, after all, and McDermott and co-director Kirsty Housley’s structure is a mirror to the composer’s own: images, gestures and themes looping, echoing, rhyming, evolving through repetition. What looks baggy and absurd – like McDermott himself, covered in a fool’s motley of sheet music and sticky-tape – is anything but. There’s no breadcrumb dropped that doesn’t lead us home, no seed planted that doesn’t swell.
Glass’s music, meanwhile, is the river running through the show – frenetic, churning over a jagged bed of percussion in Newspaper, wistful and yearning in twining violin and clarinet in Maurice. The 89-year-old composer might not appear as he did in Manchester, but his ghost-presence in Coma (no spoilers) is at once the simplest and most electrifying stage-magic. Tao of Glass starts by asking us where music comes from, but ends up showing where it can take us to.
