Freesteel Blog

The old Einstein on the Beach

Thursday, July 25th, 2019 at 6:29 pm Written by: Julian

On 15 July I nipped across to Manchester for the evening, having picked up a flier in the Unity Theatre a month before for the performance of Tao of Glass by Phelim McDermott (twitter handle).

I made up for the price of the ticket by some very cheap train fares bought in advance. As I walked across the city in the summer air past a very long queue for a homeless soup kitchen (which should not be a thing in this day and age) I saw a statue of Queen Victoria covered in pigeon poo. It could never have been otherwise from the day it was erected, unless there were no pigeons in Manchester back then.

The Royal Exchange Theatre looks like the Lunar Lander parked indoors. I had never seen it before, but apparently it’s been like this since 1976. Initially I thought it was something they built especially for the festival, which was a problem for me at the start of the show where Phelim was sitting in the audience and recounting about all the amazing performances he’d seen in that theatre when he was young.

Here’s what it looks like inside. The stage is a massive turntable, so it can spin round and show you the whole performance even when the actors are not moving. I don’t know what it dos to their sense of direction.

Halfway through the first act I recognized the performer from something I’d seen before. It was from a random show I rather liked called Panic, on for one night at the Unity Theatre (just 2 blocks walk from my house), where Phelem played the Great God Pan with his three nymphs. There was a lot of mythology woven in. The goat-like god Pan suspiciously disappeared at the same time that the goat-like depiction of Satan emerged around the birth of Christ.

My favourite part of the performance of Panic was when Phelem was having an emotional crisis and began going through his collection of self-help books, pulling each one out of the box and progressively shrieking their titles. He specifically singled out Tony Buzan who, “every year writes a new book, and it’s always exactly the same as his previous book!” The quantity was overwhelming. He ended up pouring box after box onto the table.

The Tao of Glass went on about Kintsugi, which doesn’t work for smashed glass. There were some other allegories I’ve been unable to remember to look up. One of the reviews tracked down A Mindell’s theory of three conical layers of Consensus Reality, Dreamland, and Essence. I wish I’d taken notes.

I got drawn into the misdirection about Philip Glass, who helped write the performance with Phelem over a week of work-shopping near his home in New York, and was to appear at the end on a Steinway player piano that would reproduce his composition exactly.

But there was a final scene where Phelem lay down next to an old record player to listen to the start of Glassworks, which was the album with which he first fell in love with the music and used to play it at home on repeat (joke!).

At this point Philip Glass himself walked across the stage, joined the musicians in the corner, 4 seats away from me, and played it himself.

I am so lucky to be here. I ought to go to more shows near me.

Apparently there have been some revivals of the older Glass work, like Einstein on the Beach. I just discovered that there’s films of it online from a recent show in Paris. I can watch hours of it, like so:

I’d go traveling to shows of Philip Glass pieces, if I had a way to find out about them in time, like some folks do for Wagner Operas. No one else I know understands it.

It’s a shame I don’t have a video of a Panic or this show I can go back over and get the names of things I want to look up again. We need footnotes, or show notes, or a recording that ticket-holders are allowed to access after the run. How else are we supposed to get a self-education round here?