A paper hat becomes a boat on a river. Conical light is framed by three rings, each smaller than the last: three levels of consciousness. Sitting in the dark at @sohoplace, I felt the floor of my own certainty tip sideways.
It was the circularity of it all that stayed with me longest. The revolving stage. A quiet nod to the first Glass album purchased, and to vinyl itself: round and round, the needle finding the groove. Causality and connection drawn as a spiral rather than a line. Mortality, too, not as an ending but as a helix, memories overlapping and doubling back on themselves, the same phrase returning in a different octave.
While the narrative arc centres on the relationship between father and son, I also felt the presence of the eternal feminine.
There is something unmistakably feminine in that shape. Not soft, exactly, but circular, cyclical: the spin rather than the straight line. A kind of power that does not announce itself with a beginning, middle and end, but folds back and gathers strength as it goes.I thought of the women whose vision had shaped this world without necessarily taking centre stage: director Kirsty Housley, who helped shape Phelim’s fragments of memory, dream and story into a coherent whole; costume and set designer Fly Davis, who gives physical form to the show’s circular logic, allowing objects, performers and ideas to return transformed; and puppet-maker Lyndie Wright, who created the wondrous boy puppet that her daughter Sarah, the puppetry director, and her team brought so vividly to life. A theatre made, in no small part, by women working in the round rather than along the straight line.
If you love Glass, or have ever asked a real question about the creative process, or about the meaning of life itself, this is the show, the signpost, the Way. Glass's son Ridley is quoted as describing his music as "calm and dangerous", and that is exactly the undertow of the piece itself. It drags you under quietly, before depositing you back on the shore of your own consciousness.
"Find out what the rules are, and then break them," says Sean Kempton, which is funny, as I'll be seeing him later today at Jacksons Lane in Kook Ensemble's SAND.
So I'm breaking a few rules of my own here, jumping out of the chronology of this circus journey, with half a dozen posts still unwritten about recent circus shenanigans, to talk about last night instead.
I went on opening night, then went back for the press-night encore. Because Once is never enough.
Theatres are often haunted. I have felt that first-hand over the years. But what about the ghosts the audience brings with them? That was the question I found myself turning over as Phelim McDermott began reminiscing about his own theatrical ghosts, from Albert Finney to Laurence Olivier: the spectres of unfinished business, of the show that never got made.
I brought my own ghost with me: the memory of Akhnaten, the opera through which I first discovered Philip Glass's music, thanks to this very circus journey and Gandini Juggling's involvement. During lockdown, I watched it obsessively on the LA Opera app, alongside Satyagraha, the other opera Glass and Phelim made together, about the life of Gandhi. Jugglers annotating the music with balls of varying sizes in one; puppets weaving a different kind of magic in the other. The same collaboration finding new shapes each time.
I thought, too, of Matilda Leyser, Phelim's wife, who trained as a trapeze artist. Her piece Me, Mother at the Roundhouse gathered testimonies from circus artists who had had, or were about to have, children. With three young children of my own at the time, hearing her describe her first experience on the aerial rope after giving birth left a deep impression: her resilience, her tenacity, her sheer expertise.
And then there is my niece, the set designer Fly Davis.
I remember when she flew to New York seven years ago to workshop this piece with Philip and Phelim. I'm not on first-name terms with either of them; it is just easier. She talked me through the idea of reaching into the world of someone in a coma through music: the reverse of Awakenings.
When my own mother was later placed in a medically induced coma and we were told to say our goodbyes, that idea gave me real comfort. Afterwards, she spoke of a tunnel, of voices welcoming her, and of her insistence that she needed to go back to look after my father.
What about us, Mum? We need you too.
But it was Dad she came back for. He lived to a hundred. She died earlier this year, and I am so grateful that the idea had already taken root in me by then.
So much so that, near the end of my father's life, I put the roof down on the Mini, loaded my harp into the back and drove to play to him at his bedside. He drifted in and out of consciousness, but I like to think that somewhere in him, ever the April Fool, my most wayward daughter of six, la fille mal gardée, strumming him towards St Peter's gates would have appealed to his sense of humour.
I used my phone too, playing his old favourites: Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Sinatra. We went from "When the Saints" to "My Way", but when Sinatra began, "And now, the end is near", I flinched. Too close to the bone.
Some Piaf instead, Dad?
He surfaced, opened his eyes.
"Pardon?" he said, in French, without missing a beat.
And so to "Je ne regrette rien" we went.
A few years later, with Mum, my car beyond repair, it was my sister who caught her spirit instead, playing St Andrew's tunes and Highland reels and, I am sure, conjuring the ghost of a smile.
So you see, even before I sat down at @sohoplace, this helix of a show had already embedded itself in the DNA of our family psyche.
I also carried into the theatre the weight of having just said goodbye to a job I loved, teaching languages in a secondary school. After six years in the state sector, I had taken my final bow.
It had not been an easy decision. I have never been happier in a job: the diversity and energy of my students, the camaraderie of my colleagues. But it had taken its toll on my health, coming on the back of spinal surgery last year and my mother's death earlier this year. Her funeral took place the day before a milestone birthday I had always imagined spending with her. And so I did, in a way, rehearsing her eulogy instead.
I mention this not for sympathy, but as context for what came next.
I had planned to see the play with my sister, my niece and my Glass-loving best friend Carolyn, with whom I had seen Akhnaten all those years ago. But over the following fortnight, momentum built.
I mentioned it at a colleague's retirement party, as she prepared to move into her own next chapter. Then there was another friend from the science department, with whom I had bonded further over a book called The Physics of Jazz. A teacher from the music department. My harp teacher and her daughter. A career-changing friend I had met while speaking at a Now Teach conference. My qi gong partner and her husband. Friends made through my children: the creative and the curious. Finally, I persuaded my husband too.
In no time, we were a party of sixteen, meeting in the downstairs bar before processing together to the front row of the first balcony on opening night.
I had history with this world, and still had no idea what to expect.
The first surprise was how much I laughed.
I had never seen Phelim in person, and watching him take centre stage was as mesmerising as the music itself. He was a bomb of warmth and energy, immediately responsive to the room. The audience felt instantly at ease calling things out. My husband offered a supportive heckle within the first five minutes. I'm glad he thought better of "Show us your pee-pee", although perhaps he missed a trick. You need to see the show to understand the context.
Phelim took it all in his stride, entirely in his element, carrying us through the ebb and flow of his creative life: the serendipity of Glass and, poignantly, Maurice Sendak and the show that never was.
But this was never simply a double act between two giants of their respective creative worlds.
The puppeteers, introduced as Sarah, Janet and Vic, conjured wonder from shadow play, animated sheets of music and an inverted kettle transformed into a genie. Most beautiful of all was the puppet of a young boy, made by Lyndie Wright, Sarah's own mother, and representing both a fictional child and Phelim's son Ridley.
Fresh from an afternoon with Fly's two young boys, juggling ping-pong balls in a Soho Airbnb, as a great-aunt does, I found that puppet took on another resonance. I wondered what my niece saw as she watched it come to life.
The puppeteers were invisible behind their craft and utterly present within it, each carrying a thread of Phelim's life story, while the musicians riffed and responded alongside them.
And then there was the set, the foil to it all.
As a friend put it afterwards, "It really sucks you into the story, to the point that you don't notice it's doing it. Then you think about it and realise the story would not have worked in the same way without it."
What I had not fully appreciated until talking afterwards with one of the musicians, Kasia, who played violin, was quite how stressful it must have been. There was so much to hold in mind at once: weaving around a revolving stage, never missing a cue or a beat. Yet it looked entirely effortless, fluid, as though the music were carrying the performers rather than the other way around.
The lighting did the same work quietly. Colin Grenfell's design never announced itself, and together the different elements kept circling back to the question beneath everything.
Where does the vision come from?
Where does the music?
Spoiler alert: the river runs through it. A stream of consciousness in which all things connect through deep democracy. The rings again, layer upon layer. A circus of light between consensual reality, dreamland and essence: at once the source and the flow, the genus and the genius of the whole thing.
We were swept away.
Afterwards, in the foyer, a friend who had come alone found me, and we simply held on to each other. It was the longest hug I think I have ever given in a theatre.
On press night, I watched a critic rise to his feet for the standing ovation.
"Write that down in your notebook," Phelim had told him earlier.
And so we all did, in our own way: making a mental note, taking a picture with the mind's camera.
In awe. Encore.
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