Tao of Glass review: A journey into the spiritual through paper puppets, Philip Glass and Phelim McDermott

Phelim McDermott in Tao of Glass_Photo Johan Persson

At @sohoplace, paper sheets dance, Philip Glass unfolds and Phelim McDermott turns the glorious mess of daily life into something close to transcendence.

There are theatre shows you watch, enjoy and leave behind. Then there are those rarer experiences that seem to follow you out into the street. Tao of Glass belongs firmly to the second category.

Now receiving its West End premiere at @sohoplace, Tao of Glass brings together composer Philip Glass and performer-director **Phelim McDermott** in a work that sits somewhere between concert, confession, visual poem and waking dream. It is intimate, mischievous and unexpectedly moving — a journey into the spiritual through paper, music, memory and the gloriously messy business of being alive.

The piece began life at Manchester International Festival in 2019 and is built around ten meditations on life, death and Taoist thought, accompanied by ten pieces of music written by Glass for the production. Yet nothing about it feels like a lecture. McDermott makes philosophy tactile. Ideas arrive through stories, accidents, objects, puppets and interruptions, as though the creative process itself has wandered onto the stage and refused to behave.

At its centre is McDermott, navigating what is almost a solo show with the fluidity of water. He talks, remembers, questions, jokes, plays and drifts between moments without ever forcing a transition. His performance has the rare quality of seeming completely spontaneous even when the theatrical architecture around him is precise. He allows uncertainty into the room, and that uncertainty becomes part of the pleasure.

Tao of Glass is interested in what happens when life refuses to follow the plan. Inspiration arrives, disappears and returns in another shape. Music becomes memory. Memory becomes theatre. A piece of paper becomes a body, a landscape, a score, a joke or a small miracle.

The puppetry is one of the production’s great joys. At the performance I attended, the three puppeteers — Sarah Wright, Janet Etuk and Vic Llewellyn — displayed superb synchrony and an extraordinary sensitivity to McDermott’s acting and movements. They never compete for attention. Instead, they seem to breathe with him, turning the simplest materials into characters and images full of emotional weight.

This is where the curious inner child in the audience comes alive. Sheets of paper suddenly possess vulnerability. Everyday objects acquire personality. Nothing is over-explained, which is precisely why the images stay with you. The theatre becomes a place of play again, but not childish play: the deeper kind, where imagination and meaning are allowed to coexist.

Musically, the evening is exquisite. Philip Glass has created a score of extraordinary maturity, deeply spiritual without ever becoming grandiose. His familiar repetitions do not simply circle; they pulse like the coming and going of daily life. Patterns accumulate, dissolve and return altered, just as thoughts do.

Tao of Glass_Photo Johan Persson

Satoshi Kubo, performing at the piano, deserves particular praise. His playing is superb — lucid, sensitive and completely attuned to the work’s shifting emotional temperature. In the intimate auditorium of @sohoplace, with its excellent acoustics, every phrase feels close enough to touch. The musicians are not background accompaniment; they form part of the dramatic bloodstream.

Glass himself describes the work as the result of a long artistic relationship: “I am pleased that Tao of Glass will receive its London premiere this summer. It’s always a pleasure to work with Phelim. Tao of Glass is a true theater collaboration, the culmination of many years of deep admiration and respect for each other.”

That sense of trust is visible everywhere. The production blends sound, movement, storytelling, puppetry and design without allowing one element to dominate. It is an artwork in itself: visual and aural languages held in a beautifully judged balance.

Producer Nica Burns captures its singularity perfectly: “An utterly original, fascinating piece of theatre with the most beautiful music, […] Perfect in the beautiful, intimate auditorium of @sohoplace. What an extraordinary and exciting collaboration by two internationally celebrated artists.”

She is right about the room. Tao of Glass needs intimacy. The architecture of @sohoplace allows the audience to feel less like spectators and more like temporary inhabitants of McDermott’s dream.

And perhaps that is the show’s greatest achievement. It takes the sublime, the spiritual, the domestic, the chaotic, the creative process and the creative blockage, then shakes them together into a kaleidoscope of existence. It reminds us that transcendence does not necessarily arrive with trumpets.

Sometimes it appears through a scrap of paper, a repeated piano phrase, an old memory or a moment that almost goes wrong.

For London audiences looking for something beyond the conventional West End template, Tao of Glass is a gift: strange but accessible, meditative but funny, intellectually curious without being remote. It is for everybody, but especially for anyone who still has a curious inner child capable of wonder — and perhaps for those who fear they have lost theirs.

Tao of Glass keeps unfolding afterwards.

Tao of Glass Until 12 September 2026 @sohoplace 4 Soho Place, Charing Cross Road London W1D 3BG

For more information and bookings: www.sohoplace.org Box Office: 0330 333 5961