Tao of Glass at @sohoplace
David Wootton in the West End
★★★★☆
3 August 2026
The creators of Tao of Glass, Phelim McDermott and Philip Glass, describe the show as “their most personal collaboration yet”. As the Artistic Director of theatre company Improbable, McDermott has been responsible for some astonishing productions of Glass’s masterly minimalist operas, Satyagraha (2007), The Perfect American (2013), and Akhnaten (2016), which have been performed with great success by English National Opera and other leading international companies. First presented at the Manchester International Festival in 2019, Tao of Glass is as inventive as those epic endeavours, but is sparer, subtler, and more intimate.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
Tao of Glass begins with McDermott sitting in the front row of the stalls of @sohoplace’s beautiful in-the-round auditorium. Though he is spotlit, his presence is quiet, even hesitant, and he seems almost reluctant to take to the stage. As he explains the considerations that went into the beginning of the show, it seems that he is going to offer an examination of its creation and, more generally, of the creative process. And, as he starts to talk about the theatrical ghosts that early informed his passion for the stage, it becomes clear that it is going to contain a strong autobiographical element. However, only gradually does one become aware that it is also profoundly philosophical.
In talking to the audience, McDermott weaves together his burgeoning career in the theatre with his growing passion for Glass’s music. The intersection of the two provided several key moments in his development, though he chooses to focus less on the triumphs than the trials. One was his very first professional theatre work, Cupboard Man, based on a short story by Ian McEwan, and produced at the Almeida in 1985, which used Glass’s Opening from Glassworks as its incidental music. Another was an abortive collaboration with Glass, in 2011–12, to dramatize Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book In the Night Kitchen. In introducing the latter, McDermott conjures into being the musicians and puppeteers that are so essential to his theatrical approach, and ensure that the acts of showing and, indeed, musicking, are combined with that of telling. (The immensely talented puppeteers are Sarah Wright, Janet Etuk, and Vic Llewellyn.)
In an exhilarating sequence, McDermott and his company explore the potential of productions that are never achieved or experienced but only imagined. Returning to his childhood, he tells the audience that “he is seven years old, and going to the theatre for the second time ever” in his home city of Manchester. However, he is so excited by the anticipation that he makes himself ill and is made to stay at home. As a result, Billy’s Magical Kettle, “a northern vision of Aladdin”, becomes not only the greatest production that he never saw but also the ideal of what he wants to achieve. (And its role as an exemplar becomes strangely stronger when one discovers that it probably never existed, and was entirely of McDermott’s invention.)
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
With the aid of sheets of resilient tissue paper printed with musical scores – a hallmark of Fly Davis’s stimulating design for the show – the puppeteers allow a glimpse of what Billy’s Magical Kettle might have been, or might be. First they shape the sheets into a bird that rises from a kettle, and then they form them into a screen upon which they cast shadows. Here Glass’s incidental music – scored for violin, clarinet, piano, and a battery of percussion – incorporates the sound of a metal kettle being struck. (Chris Vatalaro is the musical director and percussionist, Katherine Tinker the associate musical director and pianist, and Giles Thomas the sound designer.)
A sonic shift introduces a change in time and place, as a production only imagined is parallelled with one that was frustratingly unachieved. In one of the funniest sections of the performance – and much of it is funny – McDermott describes a visit to Sendak’s home in Connecticut to discuss In the Night Kitchen. In his words, Sendak appears as “a grumpy gay Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street”, and he squawks and screeches Sendak’s contributions to their conversation. Sendak is determined that his favourite book be accurately portrayed on stage, and that its child hero Mickey be represented with his “peepee” (an element of the illustrations that led to the book being banned or bowdlerized by many American libraries). McDermott and Glass concur, but Sendak dies six months later and “that show doesn’t happen”.
And yet … the essence of Sendak’s book is then created before the audience’s eyes. A boy puppet, complete with penis, takes on the role of Mickey, first walking and then flying across the stage before falling into the “Night Kitchen”, a New York skyline replicated by kitchen utensils and piano hammers projected onto a screen. The stage revolves and the music intensifies as the action reaches a climax.
McDermott flags up the importance of the boy puppet early in the show when he says that his first ever visit to the theatre had been to see Pinocchio. The act of bringing a boy to life represents a nexus of elements that are suggestive of creative development, including the way in which, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the child is father of the man”. The puppet is partly McDermott’s younger self, and partly his son Ridley, who was born in New York not long before Sendak died, and who has himself been inspired by Glass’s music, even wanting to become a composer. (The captivating boy puppet has been designed and made by Lyndie Wright.)
A spare, haunting musical theme introduces a more reflective tone, which encompasses both humanity, embodied by the child, and its capacity for creative revitalization, with the ruins of one show providing the foundation for another. These themes are symbolized by a story about the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which a master of ceramics shows his apprentice how to mend his broken pot with gold lacquer, and so make a virtue of the breakage and repair through “a river of imperfection”.
McDermott then plunges almost literally into Eastern thought by describing his use of floatation tanks and how they bring him into contact with “essence”, the third and deepest level of experience – beyond “reality” and “dream” – as defined by Arnold Mindell in his adaptation of Taoism. These levels are represented above the stage by three rings that fit inside each other and move to create the inverted cone of “deep democracy”, an awareness of all three levels, both out in the world and in ourselves.
McDermott is soon sharing the dream that he has had in the floatation tank with Glass and his manager: the idea for a show to replace the one based on Sendak, indeed the one that the audience is watching and which concerns the way that Glass’s music has run like a river through McDermott’s life. Glass agrees to attend a workshop to develop the idea, and eventually – following an extended episode in which McDermott rejects materialism in favour of the flow of the Tao – that workshop takes place. This allows Glass’s music to move from being incidental to providing the focus. Through the introduction of a Steinway high-resolution player piano, Glass’s own performances of the piano part of Coma and I Ching are vitally reproduced, accompanied by the violinist (Kasia Ziminska) and the clarinettist (Jack McNeill). In a show that credits music as a significant source of theatrical inspiration, Glass’s compositions and the musicians’ performances of them are equally impressive.
Ultimately, however, the show seems more the Tao of McDermott than the Tao of Glass. Having devised, written, and co-directed it (in collaboration with his wife, Kirsty Housley), McDermott then takes centre stage, and remains on it throughout. And, though occasionally arch or over-emphatic in his delivery, he is generally entrancing in his telling of an absorbing tale – his love letter to music, theatre, and creativity.
