Charming fan letter to a founding father of musical minimalism
Manchester International Festival Tao of Glass
The Tao, according to ancient Chinese philosophy, is The Way, that mysterious path to the good life about which nothing can really be said. Glass is… well, it could just be that transparent material that shatters so easily, or it could be Philip Glass, whose own gently repetitive music seems to open up its own way to an altered state of consciousness.
By the end of this amusing, sometimes annoyingly rambling but ultimately moving show, we’ve learnt that it’s both. It’s a gentle two-hour stroll through such recondite themes as dreaming, near-death experiences and the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi, a method of repairing a broken object with golden glue so that the joins are made visible, and so the item is more beautiful than before. It arose from a long creative collaboration between two directors at the heart of the theatre company Improbable, Phelim Mcdermott and Kirsty Housley, with the venerable co-founding-father of musical minimalism, Philip Glass.
At the centre of the show is a series of instrumental meditations by Glass, interwoven with an extended monologue from Mcdermott himself. At the beginning, a spotlight picked him out among the audience, wondering aloud whether the tolling foyer bell might actually be a piece by Philip Glass (cue small ripple of laughter). That led to a disquisition about how he got involved with the Royal Exchange, venue for this performance, then his first delighted encounter with Glass’s music. “This is
the album of his I bought,” he announced, waving aloft a vinyl copy of Glass’s classic 1982 album Glassworks.
That set the tone of the show, which often felt like an extended fan-letter from Mcdermott to Glass, mingled with biography. His constant air of naive self-deprecation was one thing that made the show seem very English; another was the way its deep themes arose out of banal incidents, such as Mcdermott’s rage when the builders smash his precious glass-topped table. Yet another was the deliberately low-tech, homespun nature of the stagecraft: the three puppeteers who whizzed about bearing a puppet of the wide-eyed young Mcdermott, the rainfall of music manuscripts on Mcdermott’s head to represent his immersion in music.
Glass is no stranger to avant-garde theatre – in fact, it’s where he cut his teeth, working with the Mabou Mines in Paris, and Robert Wilson in Einstein on the Beach. In those contexts, his music accompanies action as inscrutably formalised as Japanese Noh drama. To hear it in the context of a show that sometimes veered perilously close to English whimsy was surprising, and yet it worked.
At times, his luminous new score, performed with tender gravity by just four musicians, came close to the innocent tenderness of Erik Satie; elsewhere, it took on a slow grandeur through the accretion of tiny changes. It gave dignity and depth to the show’s peculiar combination of mundane storytelling with highflown philosophising. The surprise appearance of Glass himself to join in the performance of the final number set the seal on an evening of humour and theatrical enchantment.
Tao of Glass continues at the Manchester International Festival until July 20. Tickets: 0161 833 9833; mif.co.uk