A joyful experience: enter understanding the world one way and exit with a sense of how it can be different. Rating
Excellent
It’s rare you go to the middle of Soho and receive a healing, spiritual experience… with puppets. But that’s exactly what’s delivered in Tao of Glass, written and performed by the extraordinarily ordinary Phelim McDermott to the haunting music of Philip Glass. It’s a joyful experience where you enter understanding the world one way and exit with a sense of how it can be different.
The production is hugely entertaining yet elegantly complex, loosely describing how McDermott dreams of creating a show in conjunction with inspirational composer Philip Glass. He relates the journey undertaken to achieve this through a series of personal stories that feel warmly spontaneous, performed with a team of talented puppeteers. Under musical director Chris Vatalaro, a live band plays Glass’s music throughout. This provides a vital, organic core, connecting fragmentary tales and reforming them into an unexpected new whole, as suggested in the metaphor of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery to create something different and elevated. The score is the thread of gold bonding pieces of a corporeal tale that is reimagined into an uplifting, spiritual oneness. If all that sounds a bit profound and cerebral, well it is. But the joy of the show is in its playful execution.
McDermott and his team innovatively articulate both what it is to be human and also beyond human, finding a spiritual pathway suggested in the music. However, he starts as an ordinary bloke in the audience, like us. As he performs it becomes clear he is an engaging master storyteller with exceptional timing and comedic delivery, whose questions encompass both the mundane (which pet to choose – a guinea pig or a rabbit?) and the challenging (where does music come from?). He’s surprised to learn the iconic Glass eats sushi. He gets angry, just like anyone else. But his reading of sacred texts brings enlightenment beyond normal existence, explained by reimagining the space and using breathtaking object manipulation and puppetry. The audience is actively and imaginatively engaged in a suspension of disbelief, firing up curiosity and creating a room of possibility where thinking differently can and does happen.
An exquisite child puppet, designed by Lyndie Wright, encapsulates the simple essence of humanity, helping clarify complicated and emotional thinking. Puppeteers Sarah Wright, Janet Etuk and Vic Llewellyn meanwhile work seamlessly to animate paper imprinted with the musical score, giving it material existence. They create and destroy imagined borders with tape, questioning constraints. And in black costume, neither fully present nor absent, theirs is a liminal space, delicately echoing the theme of ghosts within an auditorium tracing the form of the Royal Exchange, where the show began.
Glass’s visceral, rhythmic music is performed flawlessly, the band reinventing quotidian items such as kitchen utensils and bottles as instruments, or playing the familiar differently – liberating a squeal from a cymbal edge using a violin bow. Come the close, as Glass matches the music to McDermott’s state of being, our focus is fully on the sound, creating a space where we are encouraged to empty our minds, changing state. The dramatic shift invites the audience into a deep pool of being where each individual is part of a much larger thing; a boundary free world of oneness and a happy, healing place. It’s palpable.
Tao of Glass is many things; delightfully funny, visually impressive, challengingly erudite and exquisitely beautiful. These magically offer paths into alternative understandings of disorderly humanness, bonding an audience of individuals in a shared space firmly together using music and experience, while capturing the capability of theatre to articulate knowledge beyond the spoken. You may well leave a different person.
Composer: Philip Glass
Writer & Co-director: Phelim McDermott
Co-Director: Kirsty Housley
Musical Director: Chris Vatalaro
Designer: Fly Davis
Lighting Designer: Colin Grenfell
Sound Designer: Giles Thomas
Puppet Designer & Maker: Lyndie Wright
Musical Director and Percussion: Chris Vatalaro
Pianist and Musical Director: Katherine Tinker
Clarinet: Jack McNeil
Violin: Kasia Ziminska
Percussion: Daniel Bradley
Deputy Pianist: Satoshi Kubo
Deputy Clarinet: Oli Pashley
Percussion: Simon Roth
Deputy Violin: Nadine Nagen
Tao of Glass runs at @sohoplace until Saturday 12 September.
