Saul at Glyndebourne Festival 2025

One of the couples who we take to Glyndebourne usually choose a Handel so it was no surprise when they asked to see Saul and it was no surprise either that I agreed. 

The ballot gods were kind to use and we got seats Blue Upper Circle C:5-8 for £130 each. A good price I thought.

On the day the weather was not great so many people who would have picnicked on the grass had booked tables in the Veg Patch Stretch Tent instead and that forced us back into the main marquee, not our first choice but a perfectly reasonable second choice.

Saul has a long overture of familiar Handel style which was a welcome reassurance of what was to come, though it only told only part of the story.

Then the curtain was raised and it immediately clear that we were in for something quite different. Possibly inspired by Bridgeton, the cast wore Georgian costumes and made exaggerated gestures with their arms. And that set the scene for a visually spectacular feast with plenty of modern dancing and a few severed heads.

Stunning as the staging was the music lived up to it. With lots to like the element that I enjoyed the most was when the chorus sang. And things got even better when the two came together such as they did the times the chorus piled along the very front of the stage in three tight rows to sing directly at us.

I am not sure if I ever learned the story of Saul at school (and am glad I forgot it if I did) so but I did know about David (the first severed head was the giant's) so guessed that he would be the ultimate victor in the contest with Saul which was entirely of Saul's making.

Saul was the complete package with good music, good singing and exceptional staging.

A Moon for the Misbegotten at Almeida Theatre

When it comes to choosing plays to see I have a very short list of things that I considered mandatory and A Moon for the Misbegotten at Almeida Theatre had two of them; it was written by Eugene O'Neil and starred Ruth Wilson. I fell in love with both at Anna Christie at Donmar Warehouse in 2011.

I was quick to book and got seats in the middle of the Circle which, for some reason, showed on my ticket as Zone AA Row A Seat 17 £70. I was expecting to pay more and would gladly have done so.

It was a long play, circa 3 hours, which meant a 7pm start. I left home in plenty of time for a pre-theatre meze at Gallipoli Again which I was glad for an excuse to revisit after a gap of a few years.

The view from my seat was encouraging with a simple, if busy, set thick with wood and brick. After the excessive fussiness of A Streetcar Named Desire at Almeida Theatre in 22 I was hoping for something more traditional and this was it.

I had not seen the play before and knew little about it, other than it was connected to Long Day’s Journey Into Night and while knowing that play added a little context it was not vital to the plot. 

A Moon for the Misbegotten an in-depth look into a tough family situation, tenants farmers in financial difficulties, while creditors and suitors circled.

The family was led by Irish tenant farmer Phil Hogan (played by David Threlfall) who had one remaining offspring (the others had run away) his daughter Josie (played by Ruth Wilson). 

Their landlord was James ‘Jim’ Tyrone (played by Michael Shannon). Jim Tyrone had inherited the estate when his father dies, he was the main character in Long Day’s Journey Into Night .

The play consisted of long serious conversations mostly between Josie and Jim with Phil, And that meant the play relied totally on the performances of the three main actors and it is fair to say that all three were excellent. Really excellent.

I like the style of Eugene O'Neil plays with lots of dialogue that gradually exposes histories and secrets and this was very much the style of this, his final play.

I went hoping for a great play and great acting and my high expectations were easily met.

Neil Young at Hyde Park (11 Jul 25)

I try and see Neil Young whenever he plays in the UK, the last time being with Bob Dylan in Hyde Park in 2029. I was keen to end the long wait, mainly caused by Covid, I booked to see him at Hype Park again.

I was quite interested in seeing Van Morrison and reasonably interested in Yusuf/Cat Stevens and happily paid what, with all the add-ons, eventually came to £128.75.

It was one of the hottest days of the year so rather than go when the event started at 2pm I left it until 4pm which still left plenty of time to get the lay of the land and refill my water bottle before Van Morrison came on.

This safe approach did mean that I had no chance of getting a great place to see the acts but with BST allocating the first 50m or so as VIP space that was not going to happen anyway. This approach to grabbing as much money as possible off fans is very annoying - at a previous Neil Young event in Hyde Park I was able to move in and get quite close to the stage, about five rows back.

BST had not done a lot for the extreme heat, there was very little shade and there were very long queues and the two water supply points. I saw two people collapse within 5m of me and was not surprised, standing for several hours in the sun and heat hurts, even with plenty of water and a good hat.

To be honest, almost everything about the logistics of the event was bad.

Luckily the music made up for it. That said, it was close and next time I might agree to be exploited further and get a VIP ticket.

I have several Van Morrison albums, mostly from the late 70s (Hard Nose the Highway, Veedon Fleece, A Period of Transition, Wavelength and Into the Music), but I did not expect to know many of the songs, my hope was that they would be dancy, which they were. 

He was supported by several musicians including a significant brass section and between them they made a great sound. The songs were catchy is not familiar and the hour-long set was a lot of fun. He ended magnificently with Gloria, a song he wrote in 1964 when a member of Them. That might be sixty years ago but every seemed to know and love it.

Yusuf/Cat Stevens was more of a mystery to me and I only really knew a few hit singles. He played acoustic guitar in a folky style which while not particularly exciting it was perfectly fine. Not surprisingly it was the songs that I knew, like Moonshadow, that I liked the best and what was a surprise to me was that one of his songs is First Cut is the Deepest, better known for other versions.

He got political at one point mentioning the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre before playing a song that he wrote about it which he also dedicated to the children killed in Gaza; his shout of "Free Palestine" was received with a loud cheer.

Just before 8:30pm Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts came on stage.

This time I had a very good idea of what to expect both in terms of the songs and the way that the band would sound like. 

Of course there were some new songs, which sounded like old songs so that was okay, and while the Chrome Hearts are not Crazy Horse they played in much the same way letting Neil do his own thing and supporting him appropriately as he went in and out of extended solos.

Neil and the band played for just over two hours before the set cam to an abrupt end when the plug was pulled at 10:30pm when they were doing one of several false endings to Rocking in the Free World, always a great song to end a set with.

Along the way we had numerous classic songs like Southern Man, Harvest Moon, Cowgirl in the Sand and My My Hey Hey but even with two hours to play with there was no space for Hurricane, Cortez or Powderfinger. The Neil Young back catalogue is such an embarrassment of riches that even these were not really missed.

It was an absolutely fabulous couple of hours which even standing for hours in great heat could do little to diminish.

Marxism 2025

After attending Marxism 2024 I wrote, "Overall it was a lot of fun, if tiring at times, and I am tempted to go again next year.", and I did indeed go the next year.

Thanks to universities shying away from anything remotely looking like support for Palestine the venue had to change to something commercial and so I got to spend a few days in trendy Shoreditch in a venue called Protein Studios.

Shoreditch is not the easiest commute for me and a 10am start counts as early start these days but I managed it using a couple of different routes.

Shoreditch did have the advantage of being full of cafes and restaurants and the one in the same complex, Oat Coffee, was my first port of call each morning.

The format was the same as last year with multiple sessions run in parallel on a variety of national and international topics. That meant quite a lot of moving around the complex and that is when the reduced space really hurt. We also had standard general purpose rooms rather than lecture halls which was not ideal but it just about worked thanks to careful organisation and lots of helpers.

Just to give a flavour of the event, this is the Lenin Room before it got really busy.

This year I found myself doing several theory type sessions which were useful but tiring as there was a lot of content and it was delivered at pace.

A general impression I got was that there were diehard Marxists who though that things like Facebook could be squeezed into a Victorian view of production and others who thought that the original theories needed to be extended or added to.

I am in the second camp, Einstein did not invalidate Newton and Born did not invalidate Einstein.

I also found the idea of a Labour Theory of Value difficult to deal with as in my working life value has always been determined by the end-customer rather that the effort and resources used to produce it.

That said, I was never interested in that minutiae of (any) economic theory but am very happy with the basic Labour v Capital analysis and the need to significantly redress the balance between them so that the wealth is shared a lot more with those that provide labour at the expense of those that provide capital.

A few different views was to be expected, indeed that is the purpose of debates, and that did nothing to diminish the sense of camaraderie that pervaded the event, and that camaraderie was very welcome in a world that had somehow managed to get some much worse (Trump, Gaza, Starmer, Iran, etc.) over the last year. Let's hope there are some good things to talk about next year.