Review: TAO OF GLASS at @Sohoplace

Six years after its debut in Manchester, My Neighbour Totoro director Phelim McDermott takes centre stage in this emotionally piercing collaboration with iconic composer Philip Glass to London.

History is littered with examples of great works rising from the ashes of collapsed projects. When Alejandro Jodorowsky's hugely ambitious attempt to film Dune collapsed, several of the creatives went off to make Alien. George Lucas failed to get the rights to Flash Gordon so ended up producing his own space opera Star Wars. And when Maurice Sendak died in 2012 before he (together with McDermott and Glass) could bring his children’s book In The Night Kitchen to the stage, Tao of Glass was born.

That was the creative spark for what McDermott has described as “a storytelling tapestry – part concert, part performance” but it has since accumulated an avalanche of other ideas along the way. Whether they add up to an affluence or an effluence seems debatable before the interval: after starting off with a monologue from the stalls, he fills our ears with everything from the philosophical underpinnings of the Tao Te Ching, the Japanese pottery art of kintsugi and the concept of “deep democracy” to flotation tanks, a magic kettle and an ill-fated glass coffee table that gives the show its name.

Throw in the repeated references, a range of puppetry and a player piano, and for a while there is a suspicion that maybe this show is just a dramatic response to Glass’ beguilingly hypnotic, circular and abstruse music. As McDermott admits, many consider the composer is considered to be musical melatonin – will he deliver the theatrical equivalent?

As someone best known as a director, putting himself under the spotlight for over two hours is a bold move — even if he is accompanied by three bunraku-style puppeteers and a four-piece band. This autobiographical play staged in the round centres the auteur not just physically but emotionally and psychologically: like it or not, this is the McDermott show. As we look on, he digs deeper and deeper into his past, touching on his relationship with his parents, his love affair with the 1978 album Glassworks and his childhood trips to the theatre. 

The pair have a long history of working together especially on ENO productions of Glass’ three biographical operas Akhanaten, Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi) and Einstein On The Beach, an opus that has no protagonists, no character arc, no plot and no interval that clocks in at around five hours. McDermott originally turned down the opportunity to direct that last one the first time that he met Glass saying it felt "too extraordinary" to stage; nearly twenty years later he changed his mind, and he is now directing it for ENO's Manchester programme with performances planned for mid-2027. 

Akhnaten and Totoro are wildly different works to what we see here but both point to a director with absolutely no shortage of artistic bravery and imagination. Even though Tao is of a totally different scale compared to those two, he engenders each section here with a sense of wonder through his innate ability to connect the story to human experiences tied to memories and everyday frustrations.   

Within three concentric circles that rise and fall, a narrative of sorts eventually unfolds and notions come together. McDermott takes fractured storylines and fractured thoughts and, like kintsugi, creates a whole (using not gold paint as the Japanese do) but an endearing sense of hope for the future. In a roundabout looping way, he comes to his conclusion: art can come from the strangest of places but what matters most is not its origins but where it takes us. 

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