Review: TAO OF GLASS at Soho Place Theatre

Director, actor and all round theatre maker Phelim McDermott developed with composer Philip Glass the extraordinary performance piece which currently graces @SohoPlace. In the production, he performs in the round, accompanied by puppeteers and musicians who have developed a spectacle redolent of the creative talents of Robert Lepage or Simon McBurney’s company Complicité.

There is a knowing cleverness to proceedings. We start with the lights dimmed but with one unfortunate and slightly self-conscious individual illuminated in the front row of the audience. Realising that the spotlight is only on him, he shifts awkwardly in his seat as chuckles begin to resonate around the auditorium. He subtly seeks reassurance from the stranger seated next to him. The situation is of course entirely contrived but also succeeds in being comically endearing.

McDermott who co-directs the piece with Kirsty Housley, explains to us as he moves about the space, his first theatre experiences as a child, being taken to see Pinocchio. Later he moves onto his early student obsession with Philip Glass’s crossover album Glassworks with its transcendental arpeggios and mesmeric repetitions.

The evening proves a visual as well as musical feast, with effective use of simplistic devices such as scrunched sheaves of musical notation paper to create flames, and even a life-sized Philip Glass playing at the polished baby grand Steinway which is wheeled into the centre of the playing area on Fly Davis’s stylishly pared-back design with effective and evocative lighting by Colin Grenfell.

As you’d expect, the piece is populated with self indulgences, like the episode in which McDermott induces his own coma in emulation of a float tank moment during which Glass’s programmed piano plays along with violinist Kasia Ziminska and clarinetist Jack McNeil. The puppeteers Sarah Wright, Janet Etuk and Vic Llewellyn imbue proceedings with just enough personality to be noticed and sufficient skill and professionalism to allow their puppet creations to outshine them. None is more compelling than the little boy who flies, plays and questions the world around him. In this manner, he is representative of us all at our most innocent and inquisitive.

TAO OF GLASS plays 2 hours and 30 minutes with an interval and continues @SohoPlace until 12th September.

Tao of Glass Tickets