BY MYLES OAKEY, EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
Tao of Glass
Philip Glass and Phelim McDermott
Manchester International Festival/Improbable
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 11-20 July
Heightened by almost two hours of theatrical storytelling, Tao of Glass builds to a moment of quasi-spirituality. The lead-up is a touching autobiographical account of the heart-breaking misadventures and fleeting aspirations of writer, director, and actor, Phelim McDermott, whose singular presence captures the empathy of an entire audience.
McDermott’s divergent stories, told throughout Tao of Glass, converge on the recount of an impromptu first rehearsal between McDermott and his collaborator and life-long artistic muse, composer Philip Glass. McDermott recalls his pitch to Glass, knotted with scattered ideas and excited clumsiness. The scene concerns human consciousness in comatose, a theme which revisits one of McDermott’s previous works, Coma. Glass instructs McDermott to simply “Lie down”. “I’ll try to reach you,” he adds. Lying down flat, beside a Steinway, in the round of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, McDermott let himself drift into a meditative tranquility, spinning in an eternal dream-like motion on a slowly rotating stage.
The following scene is the longest uninterrupted musical moment of Tao of Glass. From stillness, the melody floats in, delicate and exposed. As the contour rises and falls, the piano keys follow – yet the instrument is unattended. The touch is of the composer himself; the apparition of a figure; his presence recorded by and felt through a self-playing Steinway.
The singular melody is strikingly unrecognisable as ‘Glass’. Up until this moment, Glass’ minimalist textures function predominantly as incidental music that flows, gently, like a river beneath the arch of McDermott’s dynamic storytelling. Moving away from the up-tempo, rhythmically driven, repetitive textures that characterise Glass’ language, this tender lullaby creates an emotive and temporal shift towards an aura of spiritual transcendence.
In this moment, the composer is, supposedly, tapping into the deepest levels of human subconscious. And we are allured and misled into a state of awe, towards a specter of a God-like intuition and beauty.
While Tao of Glass is a touching and nuanced meditation on the indeterminacy and fragility of life, it is also a distinctly personal dedication. Premiering as a new commissioned work featuring an icon of modern music, Tao of Glass had tremendous pull. Yet, musically, the work doesn’t extend beyond a celebration of a renowned personal and distinctive language, a soundtrack to a beautiful story of its own making and effect.
Towards that nostalgic effect, Glass’ work Openings from Glassworks (1982) appears woven throughout scenes in a series of narrative recollections that reference McDermott’s first intimate listening to Glass. In its sweetest moment, the final minutes of Toa of Glass, returns finally to Glassworks; the recordis finally played out, spinning on an analogue turntable, held closely by McDermott. Far from the radicalism of Glass’ Einstein of the Beach (1976), or the epic Satyagraha (1979), Tao of Glass is musical language of warm familiarity and sentiment; a personal story of the transformative hold of music.
Image: Royal Exchange Theatre by Stephen Gidley via Flickr CC BY 2.0.
