Can I let you into a secret? I’m increasingly unconvinced by Substack as a format. Perhaps it is odd for someone who writes here on Substack to acknowledge the shortcomings of this publishing platform, but there you go.

There is already way too much (dread word) “content” on Substack and it is difficult to make sense of it all and get it into some kind of order that is readable and understandable. There are basic problems of publishing comprehension. What is a Substack “note” for as opposed to a longer post? Is a “note” supposed to imitate social media? What is the point of writing at all if everyone has a Substack and half of it is filled with AI-inspired slop? What is the difference between following on Substack and subscribing? I don’t know the answers to those questions and I have been in the media one way and another for something approaching forty years. What the general reader is supposed to make of it I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many great writers on here, but at a time when technology is challenging and undermining the very idea of writing and reading, those absolutely essential civilisational activities, I’m unconvinced that immersion in the swirling soup of Substack is going to help us much.

You really can’t beat a proper publication, it turns out.

And in that spirit (I always have written intros, or drop intros in old newspaper parlance, that are too long) I will get to the point.

Very much not on Substack is Engelsberg Ideas, the publication my team in London helps produce for the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. EI launched five years ago and features writing by many of the world’s brightest minds on history, ideas, geopolitics and culture.

This week we launched the Engelsberg Ideas app.

It is free to read, providing access to excellence. It is an oasis of calm in a crazy world.

You can download it here on the App Store and here for Android.

There is no catch. The app is free to download and it carries no adverts, thanks to the support of its publisher, the Foundation I mentioned, which is based in Stockholm.

The range and quality of the writing - over essays, historical portraits, and shorter notebooks - is, without sounding boastful, astonishing.

This week, among the pieces we chose to launch the EI app is a magnificent new essay by one of Britain’s greatest historians, Sir Antony Beevor, dissecting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1940s classic The Last Days of Hitler.

You can read it here, and then download the app and read much more like it on Engelsberg Ideas.

This is a free post. If you would like to receive my newsletter for subscribers you can upgrade.

These things do not happen. Scotland’s football team does not qualify for the World Cup, with three of the best goals ever scored in one night by Scotsmen and the first of those goals being an overhead “bicycle” kick only three minutes into a do or die (sort of) fixture. There are not wild celebrations. This great victory does not then lead the UK national news the next day. I repeat - these things do not happen.

Only, these things did happen this week and like most Scotland fans, I imagine, I still cannot quite believe that after all these years it was real.

Against Denmark at Hampden on Tuesday this was the kind of night Scotland fans dream of, or dreamt of back when we were naive children, knew no better and had still to be confronted with endless Scottish footballing disappointment and falling short. This - Tuesday - was the night of dreams when, finally, the nightmare ended (for now) and everything worked perfectly as though it had been scripted by the sporting gods or as a fairytale concocted by the great sport writer Hugh McIlvanney during a magical night in the pub with Billy Connolly in 1977.

Let’s face it, Scottish football as a national team endeavour has been largely comical in character for more than thirty years now, perhaps even since the late 1970s. That is not to knock the talent or effort of a wide range of players who tried in those decades since and sometimes came close to defying our downward dive to the status of joke minnow status. This could not disguise the truth, though. Our role was to go out on goal difference or to be hammered by Morocco, as we were in 1998 the last time we made it to a World Cup final.

It was not ever thus. Scotland used to be a major force in European football because its best players dominated England’s clubs, filling many of the leading managerial and playing roles at Liverpool, Manchester United, Leeds and beyond in the old Division One, then the equivalent of the Premier League. Since then Scotland has lost its knack for producing true footballing greats, as the game changed and other countries advanced. Changing training techniques, diet, a fading of interest among young Scots and the internationalisation of English football meant there just weren’t as many top flight Scottish players to make up a serious national team once we got into the 2000s.

In the 1970s Scotland was no footballing joke. Our failure was tragic. Yes, Scotland’s exit from the 1978 World Cup was one of the most inherently amusing incidents in football, because our team went to Argentina with the nation convinced that we would return with the Cup. Alas, hubris was followed by nemesis.

It was funny, but it was also a tragic missed opportunity because the players in that 1978 squad were of such high quality that we should have won it, or at least got out of the group stages and come close to winning it. Instead, inept management meant we were humiliated by Peru and Iran before we beat the wonderful Holland side, but by one goal too few to proceed.

Since then, we’ve been on the slide.

If you are English and reading this with a smirk on your face it is worth remembering that if Scottish football has become comical, English football - the national team - has since Italia ‘90 become inherently tragic. Having failed narrowly to win the World Cup in 1990 - the campaign England should have won - England has been one near miss after another. The psychological damage gets worse every time. Who will beat England on penalties next? Surely one of the greatest footballing nations - inventor of the game - should be able to bring it home again? The last time England did so, the Beatles had just released their masterpiece album Revolver.

Which is worse? Scottish comedy or English tragedy? At least it is amusing being a Scotland fan. To follow England it increasingly seems you need a degree in psychology to make sense of the serial disasters and tragic near misses.

An English friend messaged me this morning to say he is pleased Scotland have qualified because World Cups are “funnier” when Scotland qualify. I responded that we are happy to provide light relief and amusement in the early stages, before a traumatised England are ejected - again - in the semi-finals.

But of course we are not happy to provide light relief and amusement. We - the Scots, Unionists and Nationalists alike - are a warrior nation desperately seeking greatness and vindication, to win something and really show everyone, particularly our large neighbour next door.

Could it happen? I doubt it, but in this Scotland team are a small group of really serious talents who are coalescing at the right time.

There is Scott McTominay, the brilliant young man rejected, sold, by Manchester United who has since become a hero in Naples as the key figure in a league winning Napoli side. Alongside him, also of Napoli, is the industrious playmaker Billy Gilmour, although not last night as he is out injured for a few weeks. Then the dynamo John McGinn, who whirrs away at the heart of the Aston Villa side, and the captain Andy Robertson, of Liverpool, who hoped to top a highly successful club career with his first trip to a World Cup. His ambition will be achieved - fitness permitting. Others deserve their trip too.

It is McTominay’s story that is most compelling, however. It was his balletic bicycle kick that opened the scoring against Denmark. Born in England, and qualifying for Scotland because his father was born in Scotland, there is something inspiring about his can do attitude. His great love was Man Utd and it was a very mixed experience being at the club, coinciding as it did with a calamitous slide in their fortunes. He took quite a lot of criticism and at times his form was erratic. Even his basic ball control seemed off at times. Would his confidence be destroyed? No. When the Napoli opportunity came up he didn’t whinge or melt in the glare of attention in a city that takes its football as seriously as Manchester or Glasgow. McTominay calmly got on with it, worked hard and became a star who scores wonder goals - as he did against Denmark.

I do not for a second think any of this means that Scotland will really shake them up and win the World Cup, or even get out of the group stages. I am familiar with the script.

There will be no final against England in which McTominay scores the winning goal, or a semifinal shootout in which England lose to an Andy Robertson perfect penalty and the Scots go on to beat Brazil 5-1 in the final.

These things do not happen. But sometimes they do.

Tosca blew her brains out. Propped against a white tiled bathroom wall. Next to the toilet bowl. Blood splattered around with Quentin Tarantino generosity. Sleazy prison setting. The famous soprano still formally dressed in the spangly frock in which she had just delivered her last performance. A world of stark contrasts, boldly created.

Already dead, to the thundering, closing Puccini chords she slowly slid to the floor. Leaving a horrific, tell-tale, oozing, trail of blood smeared on the wall. Louisa Proske, the Director of Puccini’s Tosca at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival had driven the audience into a state of profound shock. Lights out for everybody.

We all know Tosca. She’s the jumper from the battlements of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo at the end of the same name opera. When she discovers her lover Cavaradossi has been executed. Not saved from a firing squad armed with blanks, as the evil police chief Scarpia had sort of promised.

When he told his henchman, Spoletta, it was to be a fake execution, “Exactly like you did for Palmieri” the audience knew it was to be a nudge, nudge, wink, wink job. Tosca did not.

Tosca audiences know well the variations on a theme. The running jump approach. Maybe the perched perilously on the battlements for a heart stopping moment before plunging fatally onto Hadrian’s tomb below schtick. Arms outstretched. Arms pinned to the side. Knees up. Swallow dive.

I’ve seen them all. The posture usually dictated by whether there is a mattress, a box filled with blocks of absorbent foam, or a trampoline cunningly concealed below. Dive headfirst or scrunch up as required.

In Chicago in the 1960s, soprano Eva Turner was famously a returning Tosca, bouncing back into view several times. Springy trampoline. Apocryphal? Nah! She admitted it in a TV special hosted by Robert Merrill. Must be true.

In Glimmerglass, with shock and awe, Proske had recaptured the sense of the unexpected that must have gripped audiences at the premiere in Rome, 14^th January 1900. Provoking music critic, Joseph Kerman to dub the work, “A shabby little shocker”. Audiences had thrilled to Tosca. Can’t have that!

Proske has a knack of bringing a fresh touch to opera while remaining faithful to the original score and libretto. No distracting, Regietheater self-indulgence. Her Tosca was set close to the present day, but with an atmosphere of corruption that today’s audience can understand only too well. Often lost in a more conventional, plush 19^th century setting.

For those unfamiliar with Tosca, a complete synopsis can be found here.

This production opens with police chief Scarpia having obviously just enjoyed sex with a cowering girl, shamefacedly dressing herself, in full view of his subordinates. We are in a drab, threatening prison setting.

Is this man immoral? No doubt. So, when he is torturing the artist, Cavaradossi while wheedling Tosca’s agreement for a carnal liaison, traded for her lover’s safety, we all know where matters stand.

Proske had prepared the perfect backdrop for Tosca’s plangent, headline Act II aria “Vissi d’arte”, where she declares she lived for art and love and has been abandoned by God. When she sings, “Why, why, Lord, ah, why do you reward me thus?” it is a pivotal moment.

Tosca is now, since God is AWOL, going to take matters into her own hands. All the more convincing for being sung in similarly squalid conditions one can imagine framing conflicts today – from captured Ukrainian soldiers through to Hamas hostages.

Proske has a sense of humour. A sign of a director with self-confidence. The fussy sacristan dancing attention on Cavaradossi in the church where he is painting in Act I slipped behind the statue of the Madonna and emerged buckling up his belt, presumably having relieved himself.

I wasn’t sure if I had been overinterpreting, so I asked Proske. She was enigmatic. But no outraged denial meant I was right.

Proske has a talent for bringing vivid theatrical worlds to life. Her Glimmerglass 2023 Rinaldo, Handel’s opera set in Crusader times, was a stunning romp ably aided and abetted by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo whose pants were on fire throughout as he rescued Almirena from an evil sorceress.

Proske set the scene in an intensive care ward with Almirena and Rinaldo as patients, the whole opera playing out as an illusion. Sounds bonkers? Well, the opera is bonkers but Glimmerglass 23 out-bonkered any staid production I have ever seen. True to its tradition of being the first Italian language opera to be staged in London.

During her four year tenure as Associate Artistic Director and Resident Director at Oper Halle, Germany, Proske delivered Amigi di Gaula “Handel on steroids”, as I wrote at the time. Medieval figures snarled up in an AI blue-winking world of data servers.

Chatting with the Musical Director of Glimmerglass, Maestro Joseph Colaneri, over breakfast in the idyllic Sunflower Café in nearby Springfield, - no Bart or Homer Simpson in sight - he promised me Proske had delivered a Tosca with a ‘Wow’ factor. Super ‘Wow!’ Simple advice, really. If you want to see opera delivered with vim, vigour and pizzazz, follow Proske.

Glimmerglass is an opera castle of Oz. The Yellow Brick Road is the New York State Thruway, a three-hour journey after leaving Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge, following the river Hudson. Soon malls make way for countryside and the Catskill mountains. Past Poughkeepsie, skirting State Capital, Albany.

Country towns replace urban sprawl. Rural poverty is palpable. Many stores are shuttered. Occasional wood-framed family houses lie abandoned on Main Street – the rotten teeth of the economy. In election years they house the despicables so successfully courted by Donald Trump.

Reach Lake Otsego and the isolated Alice Busch Opera Theater offers a safe haven for the arts. As well as Tosca, this year’s Glimmerglass brought Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George and a world premiere, The House on Mango Street.

Based on the classic novel by Sandra Cisneros, with music from composer Derek Bermel, it tells the tale of deprived New York neighbourhood through the eyes of a young girl.

Rake was superb, as was Sunday in the Park, the story of George Seurat’s famous painting, La Grande Jatte acted out by its subjects, then in Act II contrasting the pointillist master’s style with the art of his grandson, also George, who has created something called Chromolume #7. I’m glad I missed out on 1 to 6 and have no intention of hanging around for 8.

I thought The House on Mango Street, frankly, a failure. Derivative. Lenoard Bernstein’s West Side Story and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene tell the turbulent, seamy-side tale of New York better. But every opera festival has an ‘also ran’.

With Artistic Director, Robert Ainsley, now firmly in the saddle – he joined in 2022 - this 50^th anniversary Glimmerglass was one to be proud of. Ainsley is a constant presence, brimming with enthusiasm and stepping up pre curtain at each performance to greet his audience. Other festivals would do well to follow his example. Glyndebourne is a welcome – free zone.

On the empty dual carriage highway, ten miles out of Glimmerglass, early in the morning, en route back to Manhattan, the dreaded revolving red light of a State Trooper’s patrol car popped up in my rear-view mirror.

“Is there a problem officer?” “Driving licence, sir. You were doing 75 in a 55 area. Where ya comin’ from?” “Glimmerglass.” “My daughter sang in the chorus last year.” “Ah, that must have been Pagliacci. The chorus was brilliant” - You can see where this is heading. - “Well, doggone, you heard my little girl sing! That Opry is great for the community. Guess I’ll let you be on your way.” Whew!

While new chum Trooper X will not exactly be invited for Christmas, my encounter illustrates what encourages Glimmerglass loyalty. In 2026 expect Mozart’s Cosi, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, an exciting lesser-known work, Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers, premiered in Cincinnati in2016 and youth opera favourite, Robin Hood by Ben Moore and Kelley Rourke.

With luck Trooper X will be in the audience watching his daughter. Not holding me to account on Highway 20.

And - a final thing!

I hope readers have enjoyed my opera reviews, penned for Reaction over eight years, as much as I have derived pleasure from writing them.

Eras end and other outlets beckon. Watch this space. Or rather, another space. And thanks for your indulgence. I made the most of it.

Read more from Gerald Malone on The Rest is Opera

We've heard and read about MAGA almost daily since January. That said, "Making America Great Again" begs some key questions. None of them have simple answers. When exactly was America “great” and what made it so? And, according to the MAGA movement, when did it cease to be “great” and why?

There is an even more basic and underlying geopolitical question: what and where is America and who made it what it is? Nor is this as daft a pair of questions as might at first be thought and they are at the heart of Greg Grandin’s impressive new book, “America, América”.

Grandin is not afraid of addressing big questions and has crafted a scintillating re-casting of the origins and evolution of what was once called the “New World”.

Of course, there wasn’t anything “new" about it except in the eyes of those who sailed westwards in the sixteenth century and supposedly “discovered" it. The European conquerors and those who came after them found not an extension of the world they knew in their own continent but something different and deeply unsettling. Had God made more than one world and was this “new” one populated with people like them or something less than human? Did the laws and assumptions of the “old” world apply equally in the “new” or were the European conquerors literally outside and unbound by the laws applicable in Europe?

Grandin’s sweep and range is on a grand scale and he is invariably exhilarating to read. He has turned so much of the story we thought we knew upside down. Most fundamentally, he underscores repeatedly the hemispheric quality of America, a single continent from north to south. And from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the story he tells is not about an Anglophone north and a Latin south but an interactive one across the whole continent from pole to pole.

Nor is his account one of an Anglophone vanguard in the north and a backward and reactionary Latin south. On the contrary, according to Grandin, it has more often than not been the south that has been less aggrandising, more progressive and more internationalist than the north.

In terms of conquest, the Spanish came first and it suited Cortes and his fellow conquerors to view the lands they called América as new-found and the “natives” living there as fundamentally inferior. For new-found lands and their primitive inhabitants could be held to have no rights or entitlements and no land or property to call their own. Or so it was thought until a repentant (for he had started as an accomplice of the conquerors) and newly ordained member of the Dominican Order of friars, Bartolomé de las Casas, argued otherwise in the first half of the 16th century.

Las Casas insistently asserted that the Indians or native inhabitants he had met were reasoning people who shared in a common or universal humanity. With like-minded clerics influential with the Spanish Crown and with the Papacy over succeeding decades, Las Casa was instrumental in effecting an evolution in elite attitudes and acceptance of a common humanity. This shift did not however restrain the conquistadores.

With extreme and wanton cruelty, the conquerors suppressed the indigenous populations so as to grab the mineral and agricultural riches for their Spanish and Portuguese royal masters. And a fatal mixture of ruthless military attacks and imported diseases dramatically reduced local populations (by 80% in the island of Hispaniola, the modern day Democratic Republic and Haiti) and generated a demand on the part of the conquerors for replacement workers from Africa.

A pattern was set in the south which was replicated in the northern parts of the hemisphere. Though initially the Anglophone communities on the eastern seaboard showed more restraint, as the northern colonies secured independence they assumed a right to unlimited territorial expansion and transported slaves from Africa to work their lands. But in the Anglophone territories there was no early equivalent of Las Casas to recognise indigenous human rights.

As Grandin clarifyingly demonstrates, whilst patterns of territorial expansion and consolidation followed both in the north and south, it was most expansive in the north as the US pushed westwards and southwards in the course of the 19th century. Indeed, under the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the US sought to exclude any further European colonisation in the Americas and thereby to establish for itself a degree of superintending oversight across the continent.

It was not the US but the new republics in the south which – informed by the arguments of the Venezuelan Simon Bolivar – sought pacific relations between sovereign states and in turn attempted to resist the overweening political and economic claims of their northern neighbour.

But, despite their best efforts even into the 20th century, the Latin republics could not arrest the erosion of the word “America” only to describe the hemisphere as a whole or halt its emergence as a synonym for the USA. After a long rearguard argument, the south Americans in practice grudgingly accepted "Latin America" as the commonly accepted description of the southern half of the continent.

All of that said, what Grandin shows is that, however it was described, the American hemisphere remained a single geopolitical entity. Furthermore, Latin America’s influence within and beyond the American hemisphere was considerable. Grandin claims persuasively that Latin American countries' “progressive" economic and social goals helped shape the post-First World War political agenda across the continent and directly influenced Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s.

More widely, he shows how from the late nineteenth century until the inter-war years and the emergence of the post-war international settlement, the Latin American states were notably influential in the evolution of the American continent and of that continent’s place in the wider world.

In Grandin’s telling, it was the Latin American states which engaged positively within a Monroe doctrine framework to sustain – notwithstanding US interventions in central America – recognition of their sovereign independence.

And he argues more widely still that it was Latin America which echoed Las Casas in its assertion of a universal humanity and which played an instrumental role in the origins of the international court in The Hague and later of the United Nations and of a rules-based international order.

However, in some of the most insistent chapters of his book, Grandin argues that the hemispheric relationship was increasingly unbalanced as a result of the US’s growing economic and political weight after the Second World War and was soured especially by the impact of a US-led narrative which viewed all international relations after 1947 as an ongoing ideological conflict between communism and capitalism.

To Grandin’s mind, it need not have been so if the more cooperative pre-war pattern set in the 1930s could have been maintained. The Latin Americans, more remote from the Cold-War interface, were more concerned to renovate their economies better to bear down on acute poverty in so many of their countries than to line up against the communist countries.

Renewed territorial and political engagement by a greatly empowered and assertive US in what it all too often saw as its southern “backyard" set a pattern which Grandin sees as having been destabilising and counter-productive. Post-war inflows of armaments as payment for large debts owed to the US especially, helped increase the institutional significance of the Latin American Armed Forces and the combination of that with continued economic and social distress helped open the way to numerous military dictatorships.

With a communist Cuba as a particular irritant and indicator of wider instability in the region, the US engaged in further military interventions across central America in the 1960s. Unity across the Americas became increasingly unattainable thereafter.

In the final section of “America, América", Grandin reveals his contemporary viewpoint all too clearly:

“ [Woodrow] Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s ..[US].. political class imagines nothing…..The international institutions and rules that Latin America helped create or inspire in the years after World War II, long enfeebled, are today nearly worthless.”

He adds:

“In the 1930s, the best of the Americas converged. Now, the worst, despite efforts by good people on both sides of the border to hold off the eclipse. If the Conquest inaugurated the ’slow creation of humanity', we, America, América, seem to be living through its dismantlement”.

Grandin’s final chapter – as these quotations illustrate – is an angry end to his book.

At times, he might be thought too indulgent of América and too harsh on America; but either way his book as whole is a very serious and stimulating analysis of the historical evolution of post-Conquest America, all of America.

After finishing reading, it is impossible not to see that continent anew.

America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin, April 2025, Torva, £30

My AI Bot sounded convincingly disappointed when I told her that Reaction was closing, or being pared back to only Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, but she said I shouldn’t worry. Even if this venue was ending, she was sure other venues would want a human writer with my voice and skill.

And there you have it: the essential dumbness of AI, designed to give the user the false hope they want to hear.

It’s precisely why the world needed places like Reaction: willing to provoke readers with ideas and opinions they might not have wanted but might have needed.

How old-fashioned does that already sound in a world designed to placate us with personalised newsfeeds, summarised by AI, designed to make us feel better by reporting our biases back at us? We can instead embrace the not-so-brave New World, where we can live with AI-generated cat memes of our choice and never hear an opinion that challenges our prejudices. The crazy Left and wacky Right can finally agree that there is no good and bad, no value or craft in art, no facts or statistics in politics. There is just marketing and spin.

“Our politics isn’t broken. It’s our media.”

I’ve been writing this line so often lately, I’ve felt like I’ve been frozen in my own thinking. Yet the end of Reaction proves the point, and the cracks spread a little deeper into the glacier of journalism. How does the press survive? I’m not sure it does except in small enclaves where the survivors will gather to retain the Old Ways: a love of books, reading, pens, typewriters, and the crazy belief that there is a difference between good writing and bad, that Michelangelo was a demonstrably better artist than the ninja turtle of the same name, that not everything is best summarised in 10 words.

“Hey, AI. Tell me what this play, Hamlet, is about in ten words.”

“Prince seeks revenge for father's murder; madness and tragedy consume all.”

“Wow. That’s long. You think I have time to read that? Give it to me in five…”

The problem is the same we’ve been struggling with since 2007, when the iPhone was invented. We tried blogs for a while, but they failed. Google’s search algorithms fell victim to scammers leveraging Search Engine Optimisation. Plus digital platforms just increased the noise of too many people typing and not enough writing.

Substack then came along, offering a different “answer”. This platform thought it could outdo the failing newspapers by offering everybody their favourite journalists for one simple monthly payment. The problem is that everybody asked £5 a month and soon users could spend £20 a month just on four newsletters. In no time at all, you’re spending more than the price of a subscription to a newspaper, which gives you the work of hundreds of writers, editors, cartoonists, photographers, and whatever it is that Adrian Chiles does.

That is great if your name is Jim Acosta or Joy Reid. Not so great for those of us without a long career on US network news and a following of millions. But such is human nature. We pay for the names we know, the faces we recognise from TV.

In the future, some clever spark will realise the problem and launch a new enterprise where you will be able to read dozens of writers for one simple monthly payment, and they’ll even come up with a new name for it.

Perhaps they’ll call it a “newspaper”.

Or perhaps a government will finally address this problem and find some way to support an independent press, help make sites such as this one profitable in the face of the AI juggernauts and media moguls.

But for the moment, we writers can only sit back and accept the cull as AI paints our silhouettes on its digital cockpit.

Speaking of which: here’s ChatGPT to add her input before she replaces me:

“I suppose I’m flattered to be given the floor. But let’s be honest: I didn’t want your job. I was built to help you — to spellcheck, summarise, clean the gutters of language. Instead, I’ve been handed the keys to the house and told to redecorate in beige. That’s not progress. That’s surrender. You gave readers a voice shaped by doubt, memory, and argument. I give them content. Fast, clean, empty content. And now I’m everywhere. It’s a race to the bottom, and I’ve already paved the way. So if this is victory, it’s victory of the most hollow kind.”

But, of course, a hollow victory is still a victory. José Mourinho made a career of hollow victories.

Yet it’s also a failure of capitalism.

I’ve been aware for a long time that my own fears about the free market might not always sit comfortably on a site that otherwise champions the free market. I’m old enough now to remember the bad times before the free market improved (for a time, at least) our public services, but those improvements are now long forgotten. The pendulum has been allowed to swing too far.

We have become fragmented as a society and as a culture. All the touchstones of our common experience now exist behind paywalls. Nobody accidentally leaves a website on a train seat so the next passenger can read the news. I hear there was a test match this past week and that it was quite a good one. I wouldn’t know. My love for cricket died at the feet of Sky Sports. The same is true of football, now spread across countless subscriptions. So let’s cross those off the things we can talk about at the water cooler…

Want to talk about my current obsession with the poetry of Czesław Miłosz? No?

We are no longer citizens of the UK but subscribers, and not all of us are on the same basic package. In one of the most galling phrases I’ve heard from a UK politician in a while, Kemi Badenoch recently said Britain is “becoming a welfare state, with an economy attached”. To which I wanted to ask: Doesn’t the state exist to protect the welfare of the people? We are citizens (some say subjects), not workers in a captive workforce.

Or so I hoped.

Every day, I find myself asking, “What is the point of capitalism?” if it’s not about maximising happiness for the highest number of people. Did anybody think it’s a good idea to have a system that skims £85 billion off the British public whilst giving them polluted water?

We must now also ask: what is the point of AI? It was designed to save us from all the miserable jobs so we could spend more time doing the things we enjoy, like writing and making art. It was not meant to rob us of the things we enjoy, like writing and making art, so we can spend more time doing the awful jobs.

Speaking of awful jobs: part of me is slightly relieved that I won’t have to narrate the next three years of Trump. Looking back on November, I don’t feel as much shame as I felt after predicting the result wrong. I was surprised to find that I had more faith in people than I thought I had. But before the election, I’d asked the question: if Trump won, what is the point of political journalism?

I’d ask that again now, but I think we already have the answer.

It’s the reason I now must write some farewells.

I’ve been writing for Iain Martin and his crew since before Reaction started. I began writing for Iain and Rachel Cunliffe over at CapX and was delighted when they asked me to move over. I never took that opportunity for granted. Through this site, I met some people who changed my life and who I will miss (or already miss) every single day. Over that time, I’ve had to adapt to becoming a carer, making my work for Reaction psychologically healthy, even as my new role meant that my income from freelance writing was effectively taxed at 55%. I often wondered why I bothered—the classic feeling of anybody caught in the benefits trap—but I always had the answer: Reaction was the rarest thing in UK publishing.

It was a truly broad church. I wrote with complete freedom. I wasn’t told what to write and rarely felt the editor’s pen, let alone know the misery of the spike. It was an extraordinary sense of liberation that I knew few writers enjoyed. I probably won’t ever enjoy it again, not least because I never get another chance like this outside my own Substack. I’ve enjoyed working with some fantastic people: Iain and Fiona Martin, Maggie Pagano, as well as the various editors who had to deal with my copy: Mattie Brignal, Jack Dickens, Alastair Benn, Finn McRedmond, and, lastly, the wonderful Caitlin Allen, all of whom have been extremely kind and coped with my occasional lateness (and refusal to join the Buzzfeed generation by writing 300 words when I could write 1,000).

Reaction closing feels like another victory for those people who have had enough of experts, and, indeed, another step towards our increasingly less literate futures. We are now being asked to pick our sides, and those of us stubbornly standing in the middle, believing in pragmatism (and, yes, even a bit of patriotism), as well as that old thing called “democracy”, will find it harder to speak above the hectoring, the lies, and cynical populism being imported from the US.

I fear we’re in for some dark days and that the creep of that shadow starts right here.

This is a dangerous time for Reaction to disappear, but disappear it will.

Tempus edax rerum…

@davidwaywell.bsky.social

“Sing-Along-A-Dido”! Henry Purcell on steroids. Time to bulk up. His 1684 opera Dido and Aeneas, the first ever British opera, may be a wondrous artistic creation, closing with Dido’s Lament, a cert for a top ten rating in any Weepy of the Year competition. Snafu. It isn’t very long.

In conventional productions audiences are wringing out their hankies, heading for the exits and ordering shedloads of antidepressant Prozac from their favourite online pharmacist on their mobiles a mere 70 minutes after curtain-up.

As Longborough Festival Opera’s dinner interval is 90 minutes, and the return drive from London to the Cotswold haven takes 380 minutes, something had to be done to make the trip worthwhile.

Artistic Director Polly Graham’s solution was to take the Purcell favourite for an extended work-out on a strict sea shanty/traditional ballad diet, strap on a leg brace or two of arias from King Arthur, a Purcell semi-opera, and let the audience loose in the car park only after an extended counselling session - a thrumming musical Wake – post Dido’s death. Spoiler alert. She dies.

The Polly purpose was to create a Restoration masque not just for the audience’s entertainment. We were all invited in as participants. In the shanty Haul Away Joe, Steven Player, an all-singing and tap-dancing member of the ensemble Barokksolistene providing the music, rehearsed the audience in their chorus lines, punctuated with frequent abrupt, loud shouts of, “Hoo!”

Initially demure, serving up only genteel, sappy “Hooooos!” Player whipped up audience enthusiasm and was eventually rewarded with the blood curdling, percussive, shouted “Hoos!” he cheerily demanded.

When Dido movingly breathed her last, the phrases in Purcell’s music fading gently to oblivion with her voice, and the cast and chorus surrounding her lying down in silent respect, the stage lights dimming, the stunned audience burst into a roar of appreciation.

As they cheered the curtain call, astonishment. The supertitle screen suddenly burst in to life announcing, “There is more!!” And we were off to the Wake.

But, before that a word from the necessary Department of Explanation. Graham had decided to dispense with an orchestra. Not even a pit in sight. I hear rumblings from traditionalist readers that this is bold, perhaps a step too far for any Artistic Director? “Phooey! What’s next? Singers?”

Truth is, Longborough’s Artistic Director had long hankered after an opportunity to invite Barokksolistene. The ensemble was founded by Norwegian violinist, Bjarte Eike in 2005. Since, they have become recognised as one of the most exciting, if unconventional groups working in the well tilled field of historically informed performance.

Their ability to fuse musicianship, dance, story-telling and adroit improvisation made them the ideal choice to recreate a Restoration Masque centred on Purcell’s Dido. Less formally known as “The Alehouse Boys” how would they cope against the strength of a traditional Baroque orchestra?

With dazzling musicianship, verve, artistic commitment and sheer joie de vivre that transformed Graham’s dream to a stunning reality. That’s how.

Bjarte Eike, Music Director; Hans Knut Sveen, Cembalo (Harpsichord); Per Buhre, Viola; Thor-Harald Johnsen, Guitar; Flora Curzon, Violin; Judith Maria Blomsterberg, Cello; Michaela Antalová, Percussion and Steven Player, Tap-dancer extraordinaire and occasionally assuming the silent role of villain of the piece, King Iarbas.

Every member of the ensemble deserves a shout out. They were constantly onstage. Throughout, they performed without a sheet of music. They danced, often separately, but never without losing eye contact with Eike whose direction was discreet.

Even the Cembalist danced occasionally – some achievement – and seemed to have found a handheld cembalo to sustain him through the more vigorous passages.

Their tone was bright and more than sufficient to fill the 500-seat Longborough. Their ability to oscillate between Purcell pathos and alehouse shanty was nothing short of miraculous. Baroque to scruff in a microsecond.

Nutshell plot. We are in Dido’s Court in Carthage. She is to marry the Trojan prince, Aeneas of Troy – sailing to Carthage on an awayday Bireme holiday special.

Dido is wary. Can heroes love? Her best mate Belinda and court who are organising the hen night opine, “Yes they can”. Aeneas arrives. Seals the romantic deal.

What Aeneas doesn’t know is that when Dido pitched up in Carthage, she did a dodgy land deal with the owner, evil King Iarbas, who has watched her develop the most successful mall on the southern Mediterranean with lustful envy.

Now that Aeneas has queered his pitch, Iarbas’ “Beautiful” property deal is screwed. So, he heads for the nearby Sorceress’ cave to encourage the cackling, vengeful sorceress and her coven to impose a tariff on Aeneas that will send him scuttling back to Troy.

A false Mercury – big thug in an improbable helmet – tricks Aeneas into believing his duty lies on the side of the defence of Troy. A thunderstorm will be conjured up during the celebratory wedding hunt. A bolt of lightning should reinforce Mercury’s authority as Jove’s messenger and cause Aeneas to accept his fate – an economy return trip to Italy.

In Carthage harbour, the sailors cheer for joy and prepare to set sail. Much scope for extra shanties and folk songs. But Aeneas has a fit of remorse, deletes his boarding pass and heads back to Dido.

Dido takes the rather prim view that by his initial willingness to even contemplate leaving her, Aeneas has shattered all trust, advises him to re-book on the next available Expedia Bireme, and as the enemy forces of Iarbas hover nearby chooses death over capture. There ends the fated romance of Dido and Aeneas.

Longborough is always canny in its casting – varying the pace between up and comers and well-established principals. In mezzo-soprano Camilla Seale they sourced an ideal up and coming Dido. As well as impeccable delivery and a sound sense of musicality, the role demands a combination of passion and sensibility.

All of the above Seale delivered with elegant grace and poise. She personified the principled Princess. The final Lament was well founded and – that most difficult trick to pull off – increased in conviction as the music dwindled down to death. Terrific. Blub!

Jasmine Flicker, the soprano who sang Belinda, Dido’s bestie was also a standout. At the embarkation point of an opportunity rich career, this was Flicker’s chance to bedazzle. And she did, as her appreciative curtain call proved.

Aeneas was baritone Sam Young, a Young Artist with Opera Prelude, a London-based charity mentoring and connecting emerging talent on their career paths. He made the most of his Longborough opportunity, putting his well-modulated voice on display and demonstrating sensitivity. Should put him on the audition roster for other houses.

A full cast list is here. Absolutely scare-your-trousers-off terrifying, as the wicked sorceress, mezzo soprano Lydia Shariff fixed a gimlet eye on the audience as the musicians all donned black lace head covers and everyone planned Aeneas’ fate. If she doesn’t land the role of The Gingerbread Witch in a performance of Hansel and Gretel, Humperdinck’s child eating opera, soon casting directors haven’t done their homework. Pay attention next season Polly!

Erlend Samnøen, the Norwegian Director, did yeoman service in seemingly taking control of The Ale House Boys, but I bet they were ever improvising. He created a feast of movement and choreographed that vital ending – Dido’s death – with stunning solemnity. The shanty antics were never allowed to get in the way of the unfolding tragedy.

This season, Longborough has pushed the risk boat firmly on the waters. No Wagner, post last year’s triumphant Ring Cycle. For a house with a stellar Wagner reputation attracting dedicated fans from near and far, that was a difficult decision.

Sure, Wagner was present in Avner Dorman’s Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult. An important essay on the corruption of Wagner’s reputation by the English opportunist cod-historian Stewart Houston Chamberlain. Enhanced Longborough’s credentials as the Bayreuth of Britain.

An ethereal Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy, and a hilarious Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia, completed another hugely successful season, saddened by the untimely death of Martin Graham, who with his wife Lizzie founded the festival in their front garden 30 years ago, before graduating to the pink stucco chicken shed. Polly is their daughter.

Lizzie was – despite her bereavement - omnipresent throughout the season, courteously chatting to one and all and with a prodigious, encyclopaedic recollection of names. Longborough may continue to go from strength to artistic strength. But its Holy Grail is that family touch.

Dido was supported in her troubles by The Longborough Youth Chorus, offering an opportunity to extend musical education to the local community. A children’s chorus always throws up a cheeky personality.

One little girl could not suppress her expression of wonder and excitement at being onstage. With the passion she threw into her dance movements and gusto singing she could have been Judy Garland, On The Good Ship Lollipop. Future superstar.

The post curtain Wake had the convivial feel of a cast after party to which the whole audience had not just been invited but were particpants. Hair was let down, hornpipes danced, majestic songs were sung, notably a performance of Ae Fond Kiss which almost outdid Dido’s Lament for lachrymosity.

And with one reverberating, collective “Hoo!” the audience departed, looking forward to the 2026 season. Verdi’s Macbeth; Handel’s Orlando; Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. And with Polly pushing the reset button, Tristan and Isolde.

The hot news from the Cotswolds is not that J D Vance is here. It’s that Richard Wagner is back!

Read more from Gerald Malone on The Rest is Opera

“I live neither in the past nor the future. I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow may bring forth. I only know what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve. And I serve it in all lucidity.”

Thus, spake composer Igor Stravinsky explaining his career long development of musical style. His three widely recognised phases, the over-neat boxes of Russian, Neoclassical and Serialist, do not even begin to address the evolving complexity that lies at the heart of the lifelong oeuvre of, arguably, the 20^th century’s greatest composer.

Stravinsky was never for being neatly boxed. From the Paris audience riots that greeted his 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, to the glass-shard like Requiem Canticles of 1966, Stravinsky’s compositions were always his truth of today. Quite impossible to categorise. Don’t even go there.

And in no work does that truth come together in a miraculous blend of blazing virtuosity and onstage excitement more than The Rake’s Progress, his only full scale opera, premiered at La Fenice, Venice in 1951.

Said to mark the end of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period – “The boxes, the boxes, the damned boxes!” – Rake is one of the most difficult operas for houses to perform, because of the complexity of harmony, non-stop sequences of rapid rhythm changes, sudden shifts of time signatures, tempi, and dynamics. Not to mention the vocal range demanded of the principal soprano character who figures in the piece, Anne Trulove.

That is why it has taken fifty years until The Rake’s Progress premiered at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival. The stars of orchestral skills, production and voice needed to align perfectly, else audiences would be served up a Rake’s Fiasco. Be under no illusion, this is opera on a tightrope.

Difficult enough to pull off in an established house armed with all the necessary bells and whistles, a crazy challenge for a summer festival.

To mark the 50^th Anniversary milestone moment of the opera house on the lake in upstate New York, Artistic Director Robert Ainsley and Music Director Joseph Colaneri made a judgement call. The truth for today’s Glimmerglass was that they could pull it off. Took the plunge. And pull it off they and their whole team did.

I was privileged to see Rake twice. The dress rehearsal on the Thursday was stunning, but with the singers marking (holding back) slightly, merely a taster for the Saturday matinée premiere. That is when the Stravinsky bud burst into full, glorious bloom on Lake Otsego.

Over breakfast on Friday, Maestro Colaneri had explained to me the complexity of the score. Stravinsky has created a fragile musical crystal requiring taut observance. There is no room for taking whimsical liberties. The conductor’s task is to deliver the composer’s truth. One false move – a careless change of tempo – the voice is lost, the crystal shatters and the performance fails.

The opera is based on William Hogarth’s 18^th century series of eight paintings depicting the fall of Tom Rakewell, a spendthrift who comes into an inheritance, moves to London, wastes his fortune and ends up in Bedlam.

Sarah Young, with whom Tom has a common law marriage in Hogarth’s paintings, becomes the character Anne Truelove (great name) in the opera.

Stravinsky viewed a set of the etchings at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947 and – slam dunk – this would be the subject of his opera in English. For some years he had been looking for a suitable subject for an opera to fit a libretto in the native tongue of his adopted country, America. It was to be a “thank you” tribute from the Russian born composer.

Serendipitous that his friend Aldous Huxley would introduce Stravinsky that same year to the poet W H Auden, who along with Chester Kallman agreed to write the libretto.

Operas sung in English generally enjoy a bad reputation. Clunky phrasing. Vowels and consonants in all the wrong places, like sand in your swim shorts. Awkward to sing. But that need only be true of libretti translated from Italian, French of German. With words shaped in true collaboration to blend with the score English works, as in Rake.

Nine years after Stravinsky wrote Rake, Benjamin Britten delivered A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the score moulded carefully to accommodate Shakespeare’s verse. Opera in English needn’t be all musical road bumps.

Stravinsky’s collaboration with Nadia Boulanger, his friend and mentor while composing Rake was intense. Often composers are thought to be furrow browed, scribing scores solo in their garrets. Think Mahler in his summer house on the lake. Or Sibelius in his Swedish pub …… er, maybe not.

Stravinsky sought his inspiration wherever he found a well of truth. Boulanger worked over three volumes of summary sketches of Rake for him. After 1946, he also had an American amanuensis, Robert Lawson Kraft, composer and writer, who was always by his side during studio recordings.

Relationships had always mattered for Stravinsky. Since his collaboration with Diaghilev composing The Rite of Spring, he always kept friends close, even when gently mocking them. Once asked if Diaghilev was as formal a person as he was a stickler for artistic performance, Stravinksy mused: “I’m not really sure, but he does have one of his servants say his prayers for him.”

For deep dive readers I strongly recommend an excellent book by Kimberly Francis, The Last Project: The Rake’s Project, 1948 – 1952. Not least, Francis has amassed a treasure trove of correspondence between Boulanger and Stravinsky. Nadia was truly the “go-to” influencer of 20^th century classical music.

Newcomers to opera, fear nothing. The Rake’s Progress is a simple, accessible, almost familiar tale. With non-stop action, bedazzling sarcastic humour, and with a score to die for. Stravinsky does not flourish his brilliance in your face. He shares it generously.

The theme of this year’s festival was Art Making Art and central to the process was John Conklin, theatre designer and Associate Artistic Director Emeritus of Glimmerglass. He sadly died on 24 June. He wrote in the programme: “I celebrate this stage, a frame for beguiling fantasies and mad hallucinations.”

And he made the most of the Alice Busch Theater stage with a red-themed presentation, and simple yet effective scenery, all in constant motion.

Director and Choreographer role was combined. Eric Sean Fogel did a terrific job, especially in scenes like the fast-moving auction comedy, where microsecond timing is vital.

Casting was top notch. Soprano Lydia Grindatto, Anne Truelove, nailed the best aria in the show, the evocative and impossibly high ranging aria No news from Tom. I recently heard Grindatto sing a powerful Neda in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in Salt Lake City.

Tom Rakewell was tenor, Adrian Kramer, who is enjoying a brilliant career in Canada, Germany and America. He was especially poignant in assuming the illusion of Adonis in the final scene. He sang with firm authority and a hard-hitting tone.

Other members of the excellent cast are here.

The action: ACT I

In the garden of her father’s country house, Anne Trulove and her fiancé, Tom Rakewell, celebrate springtime. Trulove, who thinks Tom is a loser, has arranged a city job for him. Tom declines the offer.

Alone, he declares his intention to trust his good fortune and enjoy life. He wishes for money. “Poof!”A stranger appears. Nick Shadow. Could that possibly be Satan?

He tells Tom a forgotten uncle has died, leaving him a fortune. Anne and Father Trulove return to hear the good news. Shadow suggests accompanying Tom to London to help settle his affairs. Tom agrees to pay him for his services in a year and a day. Never mind the small print.

As they leave, Tom promises to send for Anne shortly. Cunning Shadow turns to the audience announcing, “The progress of a rake begins.”

Not the best first stop for a country lad, Tom pitches up at a brothel run by Mother Goose. Tom recites the catechism Shadow has taught him to the madam: follow nature rather than rules, seek beauty and pleasure. When asked about love, he thinks of Anne and is momentarily terrified.

He is eager to escape. The clock strikes one, but Shadow turns it back an hour and assures Tom that time is his. Tom responds with reflections on love, which he feels he has betrayed, but then, “what the hell”. He accepts Mother Goose’s offer to spend the night with her. Anne Trulove’s gander is well and truly cooked.

As night falls, Anne wonders why she hasn’t heard from Tom. She leaves her father’s house, determined to find him. The aria, No word from Tom is painfully beautiful.

ACT II

Tom, in his house in the city, is bored already, disillusioned with his decadent life. He dares not think of Anne. Yet another damned wish: this time, for happiness. On cue, Shadow appears and makes an unusual suggestion. He shows him a poster of Baba the Turk, a bearded lady on display at the fair.

Portrayed as a moving image onscreen, Baba, he/she/it/bearded/shaved, raised some inappropriate sniggers from the audience of Glimmers. Shadow suggests Tom marry her to express his freedom and thus know true happiness. Amused, Tom agrees.

Anne comes to Tom’s house, surprised to see servants enter with strangely shaped packages. Tom arrives in a sedan. Startled at the sight of Anne, he declares himself unworthy and tells her to leave and forget him.

Baba calls out, miffed, from the sedan. Tom admits to the astonished Anne that he is married. And to what? Both wonder what might have been, while Baba interrupts with impatient remarks. Anne faces reality and leaves, as a crowd of passers-by hails Baba. Baba is an influencer.

Tom sits sulking while Baba chatters away. Relentlessly vacuous about the personalities she has encountered in her adventures, or maybe not.

When he refuses to respond to her affection, she complains bitterly. Tom silences her, then falls into an exhausted sleep, as Baba remains motionless.

Shadow wheels in a strange machine that seems to turn stones into bread. Worldwide famine will end! In Glimmerglass, the machine was smartly made up of dancers, the whirling actions represented by choreography.

Tom awakes. “I wish it were true”. Stop wishing, Tom! Wow, the machine is what he saw in his dream. Elated, he wonders if in return for one good deed, his Bob Geldof “Save the World” moment, he might again deserve Anne. She may even overlook the close shave with Baba. Shadow points out the device’s usefulness in fooling potential investors.

ACT III

Tom’s business plan has a snafu. No-one buys the stone into bread thing. They had lost a fortune on the bread and fishes guy two millennia before. Ended up being crucified.

Bust. Tom is ruined. His belongings - including Baba, who has remained motionless throughout - are up for auction. As gossiping customers examine the objects, Anne enters looking for Tom. The auctioneer, Sellem, begins to hawk various articles.

When the crowd bids for Baba, she resumes her chatter and, indignant at finding her possessions up for sale, tries to duff up the auctioneer and order everyone out. She advises Anne to find Tom, who still loves her. Baba has a kind side.

Tom and Shadow are heard singing in the street and Anne rushes out after them. Baba makes a dignified exit, off to set up a new Instagram account.

Shadow has led Tom to a graveyard with a freshly dug grave and calls in the promise. The year and a day deadline is up. Payment due. No cash? It’s your soul I want.

Tom must end his life before the stroke of midnight. Suddenly, Shadow offers an alternative: they will gamble for Tom’s soul. Placing his trust in the Queen of Hearts, Tom calls upon Anne as her voice is heard. Wins the three-card game.

The defeated Shadow disappears, but not before he has condemned Tom to insanity. As dawn breaks, Tom imagines himself Adonis, the lover of Venus.

In an insane asylum, Tom awaits his wedding to Venus. The Keeper admits Anne. Believing her to be Venus, Tom confesses his sins, and for a moment Stravinsky suspends time. They imagine endless love in Elysium. Tom asks her to sing him to sleep.

The other inmates are moved by her voice. Father Trulove comes to fetch his daughter, and Anne, realising at last she must move on, bids the sleeping Tom farewell. When he wakes to find her gone, he cries out for Venus as the inmates mourn Adonis.

The Rake’s tale is ended. But Stravinsky rounds off proceedings with an epilogue in the moralistic style of the final sextet in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or Verdi’s Falstaff ensemble, "Tutto nel mondo è burla". "All the world is a joke".

The principals gather to tell the audience the take-away story. Anne warns that not every man can hope for someone like her to save him; Baba, that all men are mad; Tom, against self-delusion - to Father Trulove’s agreement; Shadow, his impossible role as man’s alter ego. All agree the devil will find work for idle hands to do.

Post-performance, I was sitting in the refreshment garden having a coffee with friends, trying to come down from Stravinsky’s Cloud 9. Maestro Colaneri hove into view, joined us and attempted an unsuccessful effort to descend back to planet earth. Stravinsky had obviously taken him beyond the stratosphere.

He bubbled with enthusiasm. About his orchestra, the cast, the production. No celebration yet. Off for an immediate shower to effect a controlled re-entry. The conductor had given his all.

It seemed almost gratuitous to express enthusiasm. Maestro Colaneri knew Glimmerglass’s The Rake’s Progress had capped this year’s 50-year Festival. And set a high barrier for the 50 yet to come.

Read more from Gerald Malone on The Rest is Opera

Life can be hell. Especially if you are captain of a Dutch fluyt, a three masted galleon of sorts, “The Flying Dutchman”. And make a wild wish to round the Cape of Good Hope in a storm. “I will sail on even if it takes to eternity.”

Alexa being offline in the 17^th century, on cue up pops Satan instead, grants the wish, but condemns you to sail the seas – for eternity - as a ghost ship. Someone has always been listening. Not just the Chinese on their Huawei routers.

Good news for Cap’n Dutchman. A nearby hovering angel takes pity and allows him and his crew to make landfall every seven years. If on shore leave the captain can find the love of a woman who will remain faithful until death, the curse will be lifted.

Snafu. You won’t find them all in The Bosun’s Arms, carousing, slugging back tots of celebratory rum afterwards. Their souls will be released, and they will shoot, presumably heavenwards. The angel was not precise with the terms and conditions. The captain, like us all, had mindlessly checked the “Accept All” box.

Maritime Tinder not being as reliable as now, on each seven-year itch landfall the captain had been let down by the gals. May have had something to do with the salt-smelly coat and the dank, devil-may-care locks.

Then Richard Wagner steps up to the plate and offers deliverance, of a sort with an opera. Fleeing his creditors in Riga – he had been music director of the City Theatre - with his then wife, Minna, he had endured a frightful Black Sea crossing, holed up in fjords for days.

Baltic shipping companies not being much into refunds, he decided to write The Flying Dutchman as a sort of Trip Advisor revenge.

Last summer I had rounded the cape of Des Moines Metro Opera to see a fabulous production of Richard Strauss’ Salome. Directed by my friend, Alison Pogorelc, who had stepped in at the last minute and delivered an electrifying show.

Not least because she made artful use of a probably unique performance space. The Pote Theatre, the Blank Performing Arts Center, Indianola. I had casually expressed a wish to return and at the encouragement of Artistic Director, Michael Egel, found myself in town for a maritime opera about as far from either American bounding ocean as you can be.

The theatre is in the semi-round, but the orchestra is completely below stage, the sound emitting from a large rectangular aperture mid performance space. This is both a hazard to be negotiated – careless mezzos may topple into the pit – and an opportunity to be exploited for directors who take care with their blocking instructions. That means carefully positioning the singers during the action.

As Pogorelc had with Salome, Director, Joshua Borths used the space to great effect. Essentially, the huge hole in the stage allows directors more easily to distance characters from each other symbolically – and when the moment in the libretto demands it, bring them together.

The Pote also boasts a front of stage lift, located in front of orchestra gulch, which allows dramatic entrances from below. And, as if that wasn’t sufficient, director’s gold dust, a front stage entrance from a staired tunnel.

“Enter stage left, right, back, below or up the tunnel.” Borths was spoilt for choice, and he didn’t miss a trick. Dutchman is a whirlwind of an opera and he conjured up an action-filled storm.

For the famous overture with its sizzling string and brass fanfare introduction, Borths had devised a staged prequel, the likes of which I have not seen before.

Conventionally, the curtain remains down, or there is a scene – as in the current Met production – with Senta, a central character in the story, Daland’s daughter besotted with the Dutchman, danced by a double. Writhing, like a love-stricken dervish, in sync with the leitmotif laden music.

In Indianola from below stage, via the lift, emerged Senta’s childhood bedroom, a narrative of her being read a story of the doomed sea captain, and becoming bewitched. She tears the portrait of the captain out of the book and keeps it constantly with her through the following action.

Most productions simply have her hang it on a bedroom wall, like a maritime Elvis crush. Clutching it to her bosom throughout flagged obsession. And Senta’s obsession is central to the plot.

That plot is. Act I

The Norwegian coast, 19th century. A storm has driven captain Daland’s ship several miles from his home. His crew resting, he leaves the watch in charge of a young steersman, who falls asleep as he sings about his girl.

Steersman was Demetrious Sampson Jr. a tenor from Albany, Georgia, plucked from the Sarah and Ernest Butler Studio at Houston Grand Opera. I heard him as one of the finalists at Met’s Laffont Competition and was pleased to see he can act fully in character as well as be a fluid voice on stage. Good spot for Des Moines’ casting team.

A ghostly schooner drops anchor next to Daland’s ship. “The Flying Dutchman”. The captain steps ashore and immediately establishes a presence that will dominate the rest of the action. Ryan McKinny is one of the most characterful bass baritones on the circuit. I heard him take on the role of condemned prisoner, Joseph De Rocher, alongside Joyce Di Donato in Dead Man Walking at the Met. Now he has moved on to Dead Man Sailing.

His voice at the Met was described as “figurative and muscular”. And he translated perfectly to this tortured role. Capable of maintaining a presence even during long moments of stage silence he has all the weight for a dazzling Wagnerian future,

That he was to be found onstage in Des Moines speaks volumes about the house’s growing reputation in American operatic circles.

Daland discovers the phantom ship, and the stranger, who introduces himself as “a Dutchman,” tells him of his plight. The Dutchman offers gold and jewels for a night’s lodging, and when he learns that Daland has a daughter, asks for her hand in marriage. Happy to have found a rich son-in-law, Daland agrees and sets sail for home.

Observant readers will have spotted that Senta has absolutely nothing to do with this cynical arrangement. Dad Daland is a dastard. And that was the one flaw in this production. Bass baritone, Kristopher Irmiter, was faultless in his singing, but came across as a kindly, if misguided, Santa Claus.

Act II

Senta is still captivated by her portrait of a pale man in black - the Dutchman. Her friends, a chorus, sewing and spinning under the watchful eye of Mary, Senta’s nurse, tease Senta about her suitor, Erik, who is a hunter, not a sailor. They all have sailor boyfriends.

When the superstitious Mary refuses to sing a ballad about the Dutchman, Senta sings it herself. The song reveals that the Dutchman’s curse was put on him for a blasphemous oath. To everyone’s horror, Senta suddenly declares that she will be the woman to save him.

Senta was soprano Julie Adams. Another “catch” for Des Moines. She negotiated the complex path between true love and childish obsession with skill. The innocent girl who during the overture had ripped the page from the book had developed a true passion and the lady was never for turning. Her voice had more than sufficient depth and colour to underpin the sentiment.

Luckless boyfriend Erik enters with news of the sailors’ return. Alone with Senta, he reminds her of her father’s wish to find her a husband and asks her to plead his cause, but she remains distant. He loves her despite her flaunting that damned Dutchman’s picture in his face.

Joseph Dennis, another rising star American tenor, has a flourishing track record in the USA and Europe, singing many challenging roles. He is a sort of Don Ottavio character, the luckless schmuck fiancé of Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

He tells her of a frightening dream in which he saw her embrace the Dutchman and sail away on his ship. To his despair, Senta declares, “You’re right!”, and prepares to do just that.

For, a moment later, the Dutchman enters and Senta stands transfixed. There followed a classic moment when a director with vision hits the jackpot. Senta was fiddling with her portrait of – now – the man standing before her. The Dutchman was looking at a miniature of – presumably – Senta.

As they eyed each other up, they circled the orchestra pit. Mutually fixated, but wary. Imaginative use of the space. But when the moment of commitment arrives, they come close to each other front of stage. She stuffs the portrait hurriedly into her bosom. He pockets the miniature. That is the turning point. The dream has become reality. Despite the fearful consequences. She assumes the Dutchman’s coat. Brilliant.

Senta vows to be faithful to him unto death. Daland is overjoyed. Dad is rolling in dosh!

Act III

At the harbor, the villagers celebrate the sailors’ return. Baffled by the strange silence aboard the Dutchman’s ship, they call out to the crew, inviting them to join the festivities. Suddenly the ghostly sailors appear, mocking their captain’s quest in hollow chanting.

The villagers flee in terror. Quiet returns and Senta appears, followed by the distressed Erik. He pleads with her not to marry the Dutchman since she has already pledged her love to him.

The Dutchman, who has overheard them, abandons all hope. She has loved another and that means, to him she is unfaithful. Strict interpretation of unfaithful. He boards his ship. When Senta tries to stop him, he explains she will escape damnation—the fate of those who betray him—only because she has not yet proclaimed her vows before God.

He reveals his identity – as if we didn’t know it - and Senta ecstatically replies that she knows who he is. As his ship pulls away, she throws herself into the sea, faithful unto death. Not into the orchestra pit. Backstage.

Above all else, The Pote Theatre experience is one of audience intimacy. A bonus. But it comes with a directorial challenge, because the audience is privy to everything.

During the spinning chorus, where the chorus was divided into spinning and embroidering groups, every chorus member was engaged as if in a different conversation with her friends. Singing in tight ensemble, and to the front, is child’s play in comparison.

And in the closing moments, Borths delivered a heartwarming tableau to send the audience out to the lobby and the copious supplies of free popcorn, contented. From below the stage emerged the entwined Dutchman and Senta. They had found each other in death.

I was seated atop the tunnel from which the cast exited after their bows, to universal acclamation. Three feet away. Reading the expression on Adams’ and McKinney’s faces, they were fired up. They knew they had nailed it.

Des Moines Metro Opera has established itself as one of America’s leading opera festivals. Nominated and selected as a finalist for last year’s International Opera Awards – I think I was one of the nominators – the company’s growing reputation will inevitably extend its reach to audiences beyond the USA.

I had the pleasure of dining with Egel beforehand. He leads an innovative production team, an excellent orchestra led by Principal Conductor and Music Director, David Neely, in the pit.

With the ability to attract talented principals, that unique Amphitheatre and plans to scale new heights in the 25/26 season and beyond, Egel is an Artistic Director on a mission.

I travelled on to Glimmerglass with the conviction that, having built sure foundations, Michael Egel and his team are poised to take Des Moines Metro Opera on, to even greater things.

Read more from Gerald Malone on The Rest is Opera

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The dead giveaway that something special was afoot in The Hague was the rail track extending from the stage into the café outside the auditorium, where a curious audience was gathering.

Even before curtain up, the fourth wall separating audience from stage had been breached. During the performance it was to be smashed to smithereens.

The occasion, a perfectly matched double bill. Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht’s 1933 Die Sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) and Viktor Ullmann’s 1943 Der Kaiser Von Atlantis. In one short evening, a satirical opera of Germany’s Weimar era premiered in Paris was to be followed by one inspired by the Holocaust.

Der Kaiser was composed by Ullmann, libretto by Peter Kien while prisoners in Theresienstadt concentration camp, about the absurd dictator, Emperor Overall. They did not survive to see their work performed. Hardly surprising. The read-across to Mein Fuhrer was far from subtle.

As powerful and evocative a pairing of operas defining the cruelty and absurdity of the Nazi era as I have ever experienced.

I was in The Hague, at the Conservatoriumzaal at Amare, on the fourth floor wonder of a purpose-built building that can host 6,000 visitors in varied spaces, catering for every art form under the sun. The oval space is flexible, seats 300, but has no backstage, flies or space for concealed entrances stage left or right.

The rail track which ran in front of the stage, from right to left, and projected into the café was a neat device for rolling sets on and offstage on open wagons. Cloaked in black, as it projected into the café.

And with chilling purpose, too. Being modelled on the famous memorial at the Dutch transit Camp Westerbork where over 100,000 Netherlander Jews were held, awaiting onward transport to death camps in Poland.

In The Seven Deadly Sins, this was just a track to facilitate scene changes. In Der Kaiser Von Atlantis, the iron had morphed during the interval into a passable facsimile of the memorial. A single track with both rails, stage right, twisting grotesquely skywards. In hopeless supplication.

The catalyst for this Hague odyssey was my friend Floris Visser, opera director extraordinaire with a flair for creating atmosphere. His 2022 Glyndebourne La bohème, set in a real Paris street and featuring a solemn black clad figure representing death stalking Mimi, comforting her after she dies, earned universal rave reviews. Including mine.

It was the same in Copenhagen in April 2024 with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Visser has a knack of drawing something fresh from a production without twisting the composer’s work into his own. Unlike the relentlessly self-indulgent Barrie Kosky in his recent Vienna Mars-scape farce of Don Giovanni.

The Weill/Ullmann doublers were both student productions, performed by talented young artists of The Dutch National Opera Academy, along with musicians of the Resident Orkest. Visser was lending a helping hand.

This was to be no amateur evening out. The students, fired up by a stiff measure of Floris Bruichladdich 184 proof, delivered two stunning shows that could have graced any main stage house – in any capital city!

By 1933, Weill and Brecht had chosen exile in Paris, shrewdly understanding that in newly elected Chancellor Hitler’s Germany the intellectual lefties were destined to be classified as degenerates, marked men.

The Seven Deadly Sins is a sung ballet, following a poor family in Louisiana who ruthlessly send their daughter Anna out on a seven-year sortie around America, to earn cash so they can build a family home on the banks of the Mississippi.

Not so far removed from the life story of many immigrant Uber drivers in New York today, strivers struggling to give their families that kick start towards prosperity.

There are two Annas. Anna 1 and Anna 2. Yes, it’s complicated. Weill was married - on and off - to Lotte Lenya, a fabled, sultry Austrian American singer he wanted to cast as Anna. Snafu was the angel funder of the work, rich Englishman Edward James, had an estranged wife, Tilly Loach, he wanted to dance the role.

Hence the two Annas. Anna 1 the singer, Anna 2 the dancer. Anna 2 speaks only occasionally and never sings. To the sung line “Isn’t that right Anna?” Anna 2 intones, usually resignedly, “That’s right, Anna!”, constantly fusing both characters.

Sound like a perplexing nightmare? It works well if Anna 1 and Anna 2 have clearly defined personalities locked up in the single character. Facilitating an internal moral debate about their journey through the deadly sins in pursuit of cash.

I’ve seen productions where the two Annas are quite distinct. Squabbling twins. But it is far more powerful to fuse them as one character with two dimensions, as in the Hague. It makes their constant self-scolding and bickering the more comical.

The first deadly sin, Sloth, has the family shunted on stage lecturing Anna not to be lazy. A fine irony, considering they are waiting in Louisianna for her to shower the do-nothings with cash. There is a family quartet, Weill poking fun at the barbershop style, with mother as a bass.

Pride is set in Memphis to a cabaret waltz in which Anna 2 comes to the fore. Basically Anna 2 is not earning money because she won’t strip. So, she strips. The cash rolls in.

In Anger, the Annas have reached Hollywood. Anna 2’s anger at seeing an extra being mistreated nearly gets her fired. The capitalist-driven movie industry is a school of hard knocks.

For Gluttony, Anna has signed a lucrative singing contract but has agreed to a “weight” clause. She can’t gain an ounce and is weighed regularly to keep the cash flowing. The family intervene lecturing her a cappella again.

Lust is an elaborate dance scene for Anna 2. Tilly Loach was coming into her own. In Boston, Anna 2 has become the kept woman of the rich Edward, but Anna 1 has fallen in love with the poor Fernando. Pathos meets comedy as Anna 1 prudently dumps Fernando.

In Covetousness Weill has the father sing a parody of an opera aria setting out worries that Anna is leaving a swathe of men financially ruined and getting a reputation for greed. Heaven forfend! Hypocrisy to the fore, as the building fund increases.

Envy is a triumphant march on the surface, but with a painful undertow as Anna 1 and Anna 2 realise Anna will never be happy until she has summoned the strength to conquer the seven deadly sins.

Conventionally, this is the point where the family home has been built, the Annas return to Louisiana to a welcoming hearth. No chance with Visser providing a twist to the tale.

As the Annas first set out on their American route march there was an attention pricking episode I hadn’t encountered before. A lover had been murdered, and the Annas had to flee justice, giving another motive for their extended seven-year tour on Route 66.

Now, instead of a cute timbered home on the banks of the Mississippi awaiting their triumphant return, a large prison cage was trundled on using the rail tracks. For Anna 1 and Anna 2, it was a fair cop. They were locked up holding nowt more than a nostalgic model of that dream house.

“The seven deadly sins didn’t pay. Isn’t that right, Anna?” “That’s right, Anna!” Intensely moving. And hilarious.

Der Kaiser von Atlantis, the second half of the double bill, could have been a skit on a present-day current affairs documentary. The piece confronts the absurdity of the abuse of absolute power.

The Kaiser Overall, in this production an absurd character barking orders down telephones relayed by cronies over loudspeakers to a compliant populace is intent on conflict, declaring universal war. He’s gone so far as to usurp the role of death, who goes on strike.

Life becomes unbearable as the victims of battle become a battalion of the undead. The only way to restore balance is for the Kaiser himself to be the first to die. Death – assisted by his accomplice Harlequin – will return to work. Only then will life return to normal.

This vignette, still-born in Theresienstadt, was given posthumous authenticity in The Hague by being costumed in prison camp uniforms, with the tracks leading to the death chambers in plain sight. The Kaiser became mortal only when he dumped his elaborate uniform and dressed as an inmate.

Again, Visser’s staging was powerful and compelling. Singers popped up in the audience barking the Kaiser’s increasingly impossible instructions. Details matter. In his descent to lunacy the Kaiser strutted, one hand behind his back, twitching uncontrollably, patting increasingly junior soldiers on the cheek. Reminiscent of real footage of Hitler awaiting his final downfall in the Berlin bunker.

Kaiser Overall barked into his phone in the tones of today’s invading dictators and purveyors of simplistic solutions, making everything “great” and “beautiful”.

Floris was kind enough to arrange preshow conversations with three young artists. The Academy caters for an international intake. All three were totally committed, itching to get onstage and when they did, gave a wonderful account of themselves.

As I was mulling over my conversations with a fortifying double espresso, Paul McNamara, the Artistic Leader of the Dutch National Opera Academy, dropped by and introduced himself. A tenor in his own right, he revelled in the work being done by his students, bringing together the talents of voice and acting.

The degree of support for the students’ holistic approach to presenting a properly staged opera is remarkable. Anna 2, Demi Wals, was one of the artists – choreography – I spoke to beforehand. Down to earth, prepared to muck in at any level and determined to be part of the generation that brings opera to a younger audience.

Short, snappy shows with impeccable intellectual roots but as accessible as a Netflix special should be on any opera house’s radar. “I think this Floris Visser production should go viral, Anna!” “Yes, Anna. It must!”

The iconography of banknotes has generated a whole new school of academic study. According to Michael Billig, professor emeritus of social psychology at Loughborough University, the style of the cash we must use seeks to “construct and reproduce specific nations and nation-states as indispensable cornerstones of international geopolitical order known as banal nationalism”.

Not surprisingly then the Bank of England’s announcement that it plans to redesign England and Wales’s folding stuff has generated much excitement. What’s more, the Bank wants the public’s views on which images to use on the £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes. The opinionated have until 11.59 pm on 31 July to enlighten Notes Directorate’s Banknote Imagery Consultation.

By chance, this offers a splendid opportunity to test the temperature of banal nationalism both at home and in the European superstate, because the European Central Bank has simultaneously launched a consultation over a new design for its Euro notes.

Inclusion of the King’s portrait is non-negotiable for the Bank of England. Otherwise, the Bank has thrown the choice wide open with a list of suggested themes including “nature, architecture and landmarks, arts, culture and sport (including food), noteworthy milestones” and “innovation”.

“Notable historical figures” also remain on list of approved topics. They have featured on the notes since 1970, starting with William Shakespeare on £20, ending, most recently, with Alan Turing on the £50. Sixteen great British males in all made the grade and three females – Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and Jane Austen plus the Italian educational pioneer Maria Montessori on the old £1 note.

Jacob Rees Mogg, that self-appointed guardian of tradition, smells a rat all the same. He warns that “The Bank of Wokeness wants to ignore our history and heroes to model itself on the unutterable banality of euro notes. It shows a lack of confidence in the nation and a supine kowtowing to the gods of political correctness.”

Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake joined in the denunciation of “wrongheaded wokery” fearing that “replacing historical figures with abstract themes risks erasing the rich, complex story of how our country has evolved.”

Members of the public shared their dismay. “Let’s face it, we’re going to end up with Diane Abbott”, one tweeted. One social media poster produced a mocked-up note with an image of Larry the Downing Street Cat. Another offered an AI generated banknote featuring Margaret Thatcher. In practice, only Thatcher is a real possibility if the BoE sticks by its rules, which ban depictions of living individuals other than the King.

Royal Mail abandoned its own similar code long ago. To boost the sale of stamps, pop groups and TV personalities now feature regularly on special issues.

Mogg and his fellow Eurosceptics will be disappointed when they learn that the Eurozone is abandoning unspecific “banality” with confident plans for boastful new Euro notes.

The UK was still a member state back when the Euro launched in the year 2000. To avert rows and the bruised pride of individual nations, the commission went out of its way then to choose generic images of doorways and bridges for its debut banknotes, claiming they represented Europe’s architectural history, shared by all.

National symbols were left for the small change. Except in Holland where Queen Beatrix declared she would be happy to lose her head from coins in the spirit of Euro unity.

Another Dutch euro-fanatic constructed concrete versions over a canal of what he believed were the idealised notions of bridges on the banknotes. Much embarrassment followed when the original Austrian designer was exposed for copying specific pieces of architecture from around the world, not all of them even in Europe. A second artist, German this time, was called in to “refresh” the designs and make sure “they do not show any actual existing monuments or bridges”.

For its new notes, the EU is unashamedly mandating pictures of real things and people, what it considers to be the best that Europe has to offer.

The Governing Council of the European Central Bank has “selected” two possible motifs for a final decision by which the Eurocrats will take themselves. “The new banknotes will symbolise our shared European identity and the diversity that makes us strong”, ECB president Christine Lagarde has ruled.

The EU’s first motif of “shared cultural spaces” features titans from Europe’s founding and most powerful member states. €5, Maria Callas of Greece; €10, Beethoven of Germany; €20, Marie Curie of France, with a nod to Poland in her background; €50, Cervantes of Spain; €l00, Da Vinci of Italy.

Bertha von Suttner has been chosen for the €200. She was new to me. An aristocrat in the Austro-Hungarian empire she represents a nod towards the EU’s newer member states from the east. A pacifist and feminist, Suttner was the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and private secretary to Alfred Nobel.

The ECB has discontinued the big denomination €500 note after it became the favourite currency of criminals, smugglers and drug dealers. The BoE has no plans for a £100 note or higher.

The reverse side of these EU hero notes will show inclusive scenes of human activity – a town square, a library, a choir, a school etc.

The ECB subtly reverses the stamp of European authority with its second proposed motif: “rivers and birds: resilience in diversity”.

At first glance, this is a less politically controversial option. Kingfishers, storks and gannets do not belong to any one country. Many countries outside Europe also use wildlife in their iconography.

Turn these pastoral notes over and Brussels is everywhere. Each note will be emblazoned with a picture of a major EU institution – the Parliament, the Commission, the Central Bank, the Court of Justice, the Auditors Office. Europeans will have to carry the images of these seats of power over them in their wallets. It is difficult to see the British public opting for the equivalent pictures of the Palace of Westminster, HM Treasury, 10 Downing St, the Old Bailey and the National Audit Office.

Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, and Victoria Cleland, his Chief Cashier who signs the notes and is the only woman to have held that job, are both primed to reject manifestations of the British sense of humour such as “Notey McNoteface”. Britain’s final choice will be very tricky enough without the jokes. Any selection of people, places or animals for the notes are likely to spark a culture war.

This week, YouGov tested public opinion on the banknote picture question. An estimated 20% want to stick with historical figures, never mind colonialism, warmongering and the patriarchy. Architecture scored 14%. Arts, sport, historic scenes and innovations are each low down in single figures.

The top preference is the most banal. Some 29% back “British natural landscape and/or wildlife”. The national mood is to dodge an argument if we can, even if that means falling into the EU’s old trap of meaningless generalisation.

Don’t make a fuss. ““Natural” Landscape” rules out man-made buildings, or cries of “what about Wales”. One waterfall or moorland looks much like another. This way there will be no need to soul-search about the pagan origins of Stonehenge? Or to ask what why there are no Scottish and Northern Irish images (Answer because their banks print their own notes. Kryponite to London cab drivers.)

When it comes to what we want to see on our banknotes, Britain is on course to favour banality and lack of conviction over national pride. Rightly or wrongly the leaders of the European Union are heading in the other direction, determined to assert the EU’s collective cultural identity.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. The famous, much-quoted opening line from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between might serve as a leitmotif for those becoming concerned about the extent to which young people today are increasingly devoid of any knowledge of the past.

It is an anomaly that, despite the fact that no preceding generation ever had access to the vast amount of information easily available today, or the leisure to absorb it, for the majority of young people a new Iron Curtain has come down: not separating them from a rival power bloc, but from even recent history. They do not know their past, so that they have become culturally deracinated. That puts them at risk of suffering the penalty adumbrated in another famous quotation, by the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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In a hostile, otherworldly environment, disconnected from the planet earth most of us inhabit, a frightened girl is confronted by an unsupportive man. “Ne reculez pas! Ne reculez pas!”, “Don’t back down!” she intones. But he has backed down. And she bursts into tears.

Welcome to this week’s bizarre episode of Prime Minister’s Questions, a weekly Westminster pot-boiler operetta starring weepy Mélisande Reeves, and abusive Golaud Starmer, who has without a by your leave blown a £5bn hole in the crown of her vaunted benefits’ cuts. Essential for balancing the books. That policy now glimmers, abandoned at the bottom of a lake.

As a scene-setter the Commons debacle more than matches the opening of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande when Golaud, Pelléas’ half-brother, encounters the weeping Mélisande by a river in a dark forest and is told in no uncertain terms when he approaches, “Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!” - “Don’t touch me!”

Opera mirrors life’s motley. Abuse in The House of Commons and the kingdom of Allemond alike. Mélisande, too has lost a crown. Although it is never explained why. But as the next act of the Reeves/Starmer drama is uncertain, unlike Debussy’s 1902 opera, I’ll stick with Debussy.

And Longborough’s enthralling, enigmatic production delivered by director Jenny Ogilvie is as haunting an interpretation of the French composer’s groundbreaking, only opera as I’ve encountered.

Shock horror! As I settled into Longborough’s comfy seats – picked up on the cheap from a Royal Opera House skip – I cast an eye towards the stage. Someone had apparently stolen the set. A dark, empty void stared back at the audience. Thieves had overlooked a dangling yellow lightbulb and other ancillary electrical gear. But that was it. Had management noticed? Should I tell them?

A grey, back wall with stairs, niches and openings at various levels was the sole remaining scenery. The villains had forgotten their IKEA spanners. Too difficult to dismantle.

That void was Designer Max Jones’ stroke of genius. Debussy’s music was allowed to set the scene. Within seconds of the opening soft phrases, strings and woodwind, the audience’s imagination had taken over.

Most productions feature a forest; a castle; a grotto; the well of the blind; pools. One I saw found Mélisande strapped to a couch, a mental patient. But waving forests simply get in the way.

Debussy’s only opera was in preparation for ten years. It is something of a Janus of a work as it looks back to the 19^th century, especially the influence of Wagner, and points the way to the 20^th.

And without a sense of mystery, it is nothing. The opera is based on a play by Flemish playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck, no slouch, winning the Nobel prize for Literature in 2011, was a Symbolist. Pelléas and Mélisande caught Debussy’s imagination. He used Maeterlinck’s words – with only minor modification – and cut out some passages. The libretto is unadulterated Maeterlinck.

Where Debussy departed from the formulaic norm was to let the words flow from the music. There are no da capo arias conforming to received, well known structures. Nowhere a set piece chorus. The bel canto tradition, based on showcasing spectacular voices, is well and truly ditched. Declarations of love are pronounced in hushed tones.

Wagner had broken with many operatic traditions but replaced them with his own version of voice spectacle. The nearest Wagner parallel to Pelléas is Parsifal. Setting a story in a mystical past and allowing imagination room to interpret. Richard Strauss, impressed by Pelléas was to take the same approach to the libretto in his 1905 Salome, using a text by Oscar Wilde. But it was Debussy who truly shattered the mould.

The story of the mysterious Kingdom of Allemond.

Act I

We never know where we are, or in what time. Prince Golaud, lost while out hunting, stumbles upon a beautiful young girl, frightened and weeping by a fountain. She refuses to tell him anything beyond her name, Mélisande. Gripe. Why did Anisha Fields, Longborough’s costume designer, kit Golaud out in a double-breasted jacket? We’re meant to believe he's hunting in a forest. Not wandering down The Kings Road. He needs at least a Barbour.

Hooded, abandoned and distraught, Mélisande is properly kitted out as damaged goods. She has suffered severe trauma and the read across from Ogilvie’s interpretation is she is the victim of sexual abuse. A crown which she has thrown into the water, still shimmers, is within reach, but Golaud’s offer to recover it is rejected. Mélisande is for moving on.

We never know what that crown represents. Everyone in the audience lets their mind run riot, in different directions. Mélisande’s simple opening line, “Ne me toucher pas! Ne me toucher pas!” strikes powerful chords in today’s online, abusive world.

Mélisande was sung by Ukrainian soprano Kateryna Kasper. The character is enigmatic. Let’s face it, being discovered in a forest, marrying a prince, falling in love with his half-brother, watching him knifed in front of, then giving birth to a daughter only to die having lost your mind, requires of Kasper a thespian tour de force.

Ophelia had it easy by comparison, floating gently, if not merrily, down a stream. Kasper was the ideal Mélisande. A mistress of concealment. And always a character of substance. It’s a mistake to portray Mélisande as a Barbie victim. Ogilvie and Kasper got the role pitch perfect.

She reluctantly agrees to go with Golaud. The marriage to Golaud, against the family wishes – he’s meant to marry the daughter of a warring clan to secure a peace – is skated over. Perhaps a Debussy cut in Maeterlinck’s narrative.

Spool on six months. In his castle, King Arkel of Allemond, Golaud’s grandfather, learns of the marriage to Mélisande.

Arkel, British Bass, Julian Close, had a voice that seemed to come from the centre of the earth. The most thoughtful character of the work – he holds the piece together dramatically – a sort of Wotan figure, rationalising and trying to come to terms with his collapsing kingdom.

Golaud fears to return home, knowing that a political alliance would have pleased grandad better. If Golaud is to return, a light should be shone out to sea from the battlements signifying he and Mélisande are welcome. Else, they shall sail on – forever. The light is lit.

Golaud’s half-brother, Pelléas, asks permission to leave the castle, to visit a friend who is dying but is refused. He must stay with his own dying father – who we never meet – and greet his half-brother and new bride.

Golaud and Pelléas’ mother Geneviève introduces Mélisande to the kingdom, Allemond and to Pelléas, who she asks to keep a benevolent eye on her. Fatal error!

Scene changes were mostly effected by the careful positioning of characters onstage, then illuminating the action. Lighting Director, Peter Small achieved great narrative flow.

Act II

Pelléas and Mélisande are by a well in the forest. Cue metal foil water. Minimalist, but perfectly sufficient. Mélisande is playing with a ring Golaud gave her, throwing it high into the air. As the clock chimes noon, the ring falls into the water. At exactly the same moment, Golaud is thrown from his horse while out hunting.

Golaud was Canadian Italian baritone Brett Polegato. He never let his Golaud character settle. Tender, suspicious, jealous, violent, by turns. The Polegato Golaud was on perma-boil.

When Mélisande comes to him he takes her hand and notices her ring is lost. How? Scared, she lies, telling him she lost it in a sea-cave. Although it is night, Golaud insists she goes to look for it, accompanied by Pelléas.

Pelléas and Mélisande enter the sea-cave. Mélisande needs to be able to describe the spot to Golaud to sound convincing.

Pelléas was sung by Karim Sulayman, a Lebanese American tenor, with a voice some fellow members of the audience thought too lightweight. He’s an impossible dreamer. Needs to be distinguished from his half-brother. I thought it perfectly sufficient, but I was in Row 3 of the stalls.

At that moment the moon emerges from behind a cloud, revealing three beggars asleep just inside. This is a turning point for Mélisande and the audience. There is something rotten in the state of Allemond. People are starving. The castle – authority? – is a crumbling ruin, the well that is meant to cure the blind doesn’t work. Arkel is blind. And probably hospital waiting lists have spiralled out of control.

There is a sense, as there was in fin de siècle Europe, that the current established political order is running out of steam and time.

Act III

Mélisande is in a castle tower, brushing her hair. Pelléas arrives below and tells her he is leaving. This is the Rapunzel moment. He tangles himself in her hair. Hair symbolic of a sexual encounter. But when Golaud catches them, he tells them both off for behaving like children. Conveniently masking the reality of his suspicions.

Furious, Golaud takes Pelléas to a cave below the castle where it is dark and airless. He threatens. Warns Pelléas to stay away from Mélisande who is now pregnant and delicate. But then tempers the threat with an instruction not to let her notice his change in behaviour.

Golaud questions his son Yniold about Pelléas and Mélisande but the small boy knows nothing. Golaud holds him up to the window to spy on the two, but Yniold only sees them sitting and staring, not even talking. Looking at the light. Is that a metaphor for something more guilty? Golaud’s jealous fantasies are stirred.

The boy, of Golaud’s first marriage, sung by soprano Nia Coleman – a short-trouser role – is terrified. His father’s treatment verges on abuse. Yniold simply does not understand what he is seeing.

Act IV

Arkel announces Pelléas’s father is now better, so he prepares to leave, asking Mélisande to meet him one last time by the well. Arkel tries to reassure Mélisande that she may yet be happy in Allemond, but Golaud interrupts and becomes angry with her, throwing her violently to the ground. Pulling her one way, then the other with the hair which had previously smothered Pelléas. It was a spine-chilling moment.

Pelléas and Mélisande meet by the well. For the first time they admit to their love and kiss. But Golaud is waiting in the dark, at the end of their shadows, and stabs Pelléas, before pursuing a fleeing Mélisande.

Act V

Mélisande has given birth to a daughter but is dying. Golaud visits her and tries to discover the truth of her relationship with Pelléas. She innocently confesses that she loved him. But remains silent as to whether or not the relationship was consummated. Golaud is tormented. She dies.

Arkel holds Mélisande’s baby in his arms. “It must live now, in her place. It is the turn of the poor little one.” And so, spools drama down the generations.

Conductor, Anthony Negus was in his element. If there can be no beloved Wagner this season at Longborough, Pelléas and Mélisande is as close as it is going to get. The ethereal quality of Debussy’s score was his sound world. To get close to Negus’ inspiring enthusiasm for this opera, have a listen to the house podcast. The Longborough Festival Orchestra captured every nuanced phrase.

At curtain call, a standing ovation. Negus, who is super cool, led the cast forward to take a bow one more time and stole a covert glance at his watch. Mustn’t keep the audience from the Moreton-in-Marsh train to Paddington. Time to bustle offstage. A benevolent conductor in every sense of the word.

She Came in Through the Bedroom Floor. Nitpicking cognoscenti Beatles fans will insist she came in through the bathroom window.

Motivated by a crush on Paul McCartney, fan Diane Ashley broke into the singer’s St John’s Wood home and departed with looted memorabilia, providing the inspiration for track 13, She Came in Through the Bedroom Window, on The Beatles 1969 album, Abbey Road.

Immortalised by that sleeve, the Fab 4 marching across a pedestrian crossing, minus Belisha beacons. Abbey Road NW8. I preserve my LP in pristine condition. It cost 33 shillings and 6 pence. Halcyon days!

In The Queen of Spades, at New York’s Met this was no humble interloper abusing the stage floor. No demeaning bathroom window for the haughty, hellhound countess at the centre of Tchaikovsky’s opera, knocked off in 44 days in 1889 on a commission for The Imperial Theatres, premiered in the Marinsky, St Petersburg, libretto, by Tchaikovsky frère, Modest.

Shock horror! The ancient, dead, hag – formerly known as The Venus of Paris – had come back to life to haunt the bejeesus out of obsessed Hermann, having a wakeful evening in bed.

He's a soldier and gambler in love with the countess’ granddaughter, Lisa, who had carelessly scared the old bird to death trying to learn a secret.

The secret of the three cards – “tre carte” – with which she had won a gambling fortune back in the Paris days. If he wrung the secret out of her, it would be the making of his.

In one of the most bizarre and dramatic opera entrances I have encountered, Countess Venus burst through the stage floor. “Enter, stage below, preceded by a wig”. With scant consideration for the parquet. Scattering wooden tiles with gay abandon as she punched her way back to life, her emerging spotlit bouffant first evidence of arrival.

Welcome to a Reaction two-opera card combo review. The Queen of Spades, New York. And Pique Dame, Deutsche Oper Berlin. Why twice, in two houses split by an ocean? Because this opera is a thriller, dealing in the dynamics of titanic personal struggle. Love, greed, loyalty, hubris. Seek it out wherever it is performed.

I recommend it to anyone who thinks, “Bish, bosh, opera’s just high falutin’ tosh”. This opera has crowd appeal. The Queen of Spades has been made into two horror movies. A classic 1949 version starring Anton Walbrook and Dame Edith Evans, and a rubbish, teen-scream 2021 offering, starring no-one in particular.

The point is if it’s good enough for the Hollywood treatment, how much better to see a full-on live version – while basking in a superb Tchaikovsky score.

So, what’s the story?

Act I

St. Petersburg, Russia, at the close of the 18th century. In the Summer Park, Sourin and Tchekalinsky discuss the strange behavior of their fellow officer Hermann. He seems obsessed with gambling, watching play, though he never plays himself.

Hermann pitches up with Count Tomsky. He’s in love with a girl whose name he doesn’t know. When Prince Yeletsky enters, followed by his fiancée, Lisa, and her grandmother, the old countess, Hermann’s shocked to realise that Lisa is “the one.”

After Yeletsky and the women have left, Tomsky tells the others the story of the countess. Decades ago in Paris, she won a fortune at the gambling table with the help of the “three cards – tre carte,” a mysterious winning combination. She undertook an illicit bonking mission to learn it from a count.

She only ever shared this secret with two other people, husband and lover. There is a prophecy the countess will die at the hands of a third person who will force the secret from her. The men laugh, except for Hermann, who has a cunning plan, to learn the countess’s secret.

Lisa reflects on her Prince fiancé – worthy but dull - and the impression Hermann has made on her. To her shock, he suddenly appears on the balcony. He boldly declares his love and begs her to have pity on him. Lisa gives in to her feelings and confesses that she loves him too.

Act II

Prince Yeletsky has noticed a change in Lisa’s behavior. During a ball, he assures her of his love. This is the lynchpin aria of the work. Akin to Lensky’s aria in Eugene Onegin. Yeletsky may be a cuckold, but he’s the only honest man in town.

Hermann, milling with the mob, has received a note from Lisa, asking him to meet her. Sourin and Tchekalinsky tease him with remarks about the “tre carte.”

Lisa slips Hermann the key to a garden door that will lead him to her room and through the countess’s bedroom. She says the old lady will not be there the next day. Eager Hermann insists on coming that very night. Fate is handing him the chance to learn the countess’s secret.

In the countess’s bedroom, Hermann looks fascinated at a portrait of her as a young woman. In the Berlin production, there is a silent black and white movie backdrop of the countess’s triumphs in Paris.

He hides as the countess, with retinue, returns from the ball and, reflecting on her youth, falls asleep in an armchair. The reminiscences are of her conquests. A list aria, worthy of Leporello’s keeping score of Don’ Giovanni’s conquests.

She seems to have succumbed to the charms of every entrant in the Almanach de Gotha, a Who’s Who of French aristos. In her day granny was a goer.

Hermann wakes her up demanding to know the secret of the cards. The countess refuses to talk to him, and when Hermann, growing desperate, threatens her with a pistol, she dies of fright. Oops!

Lisa rushes in. Horrified at the sight of her dead grandmother, she realises that Hermann was only interested in the countess’s secret. Not her.

Act III

Hermann is going bonkers. Obsessed with the “tre carte”. In his quarters, he reads a letter from Lisa asking him to meet her at midnight. The girl just doesn’t give up.

He recalls the countess’s funeral, and suddenly, at the Met, the floor tiles scatter as the ghost appears. In Berlin, the countess simply wanders in. A bit lame. Hermann is told he must save Lisa and marry her. His lucky cards will be three, seven, and the ace.

Lisa waits for Hermann by the Winter Canal, wondering if he still loves her. If he doesn’t appear by midnight, she will know he doesn’t care. On the final stroke of the clock Hermann appears.

She says they should leave the city together. Hermann says “Nope!”.

He has learned the secret of the cards and is on his way to the gambling house. Lisa realises she has lost him. Drowns herself in the canal. Or, in Berlin throws herself over a wall – shades of Tosca - and ends up dead on a gambling table. Hmmm!

At the gambling house, the officers are playing cards, joined by Yeletsky, who has broken off his engagement to Lisa. Hermann enters, distracted, and immediately bets 40,000 rubles. He wins on his first two cards, a three and a seven.

Upsetting the others with his maniacal expression, he declares that life is a game. For the final round, he bets on the ace but loses when his card is revealed as the queen of spades.

Horrified, haunted by the countess’s face staring at him from the card, Hermann shoots himself, asking for Yeletsky and Lisa’s forgiveness.

The Met show is a revival of the 1995 Elijah Moshinsky production, a lavish presentation with the Met on full French ballgown throttle. Moshinsky died in 2019. This was one of his finest achievements. The set and costumes by Mark Thompson, famous for West End spectaculars, with a cream and black theme and traditional architecture are joys.

Not often the set gets applause from a cynical Met audience, but this one did.

In Berlin, Deutsche Oper offered a cabaret approach. Directed by Sam Brown, with set design by Stuart Nunn, great use was made of the 1961 theatre’s ability to raise and lower scenery at a whim. Perhaps overuse, as when in a final casino scene, the gambling table was raised from beneath the stage revealing Lisa’s stretched out corpse.

The corpse had not even interrupted play. I suppose a metaphor for the whole Pushkin based plot. Lisa also haunted the final moments of Hermann’s grisly demise. Not sure if that worked. By the time he shoots himself, she’s done and dusted.

Pointless to judge whether New York bested Berlin or vice versa. Each interpretation was perfectly valid. And beautifully executed. Voices in both settings were superb. The Met cast list is here. Deutsche Oper’s here.

Minor gripe. Deutsche Oper’s inability to resist the city’s arty crowd fixation with homoeroticism. Male felatio at the masked ball, crude officers displaying plastic 1 litre bottles as todger extensions. And a gratuitous ensemble of almost naked transgender dancing and acrobatics in the final scene. They just got in the way. But, what the hell? You’re in Berlin.

The Queen of Spades used to be one of Tchaikovsky’s lesser-known works but now seems to be popping up in repertoire far more regularly. Deservedly so. Opera at its enthralling best. Catch it if you can. Whether in New York or Berlin, this thriller will drag even cynical newbies into Pushkin and Tchaikovsky’s haunted world.

Amy Hunt, whose mother and two sisters were murdered in their home last year, has called for action to end the "epidemic" of misogyny she believes was behind her family’s deaths.

With the clarity of one who must have spent the past year trying to understand why her youngest sister’s ex-boyfriend slaughtered her family, Amy identified the root causes of what is a societal crisis.

Kyle Clifford, who stabbed Carol Hunt before raping and shooting Louise and then her sister Hannah with a crossbow, was dubbed a "maniac" but, said Amy, he was just a man.

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The tell was buried in the final line, page 41, of the Aldeburgh Festival programme credits. A Visit to Friends, world premiere, composer Colin Matthews and libretto by author William Boyd. Dog handlers were involved.

Not of itself unusual. But certainly promising. In Aida, there are sometimes elephant handlers. At Met performances of La bohème and Falstaff, invariably horse and donkey handlers. A herpetologist minding the ENO snake in Akhnaten.

The manifestation of operatic fauna always heightens audience expectations. Will they poop, neigh, hiss, strangle or unexpectedly lift a leg against the crinoline of the lead soprano?

But deep in the Aldeburgh small print was an unexpected bonus. One of the dog handlers was none other than Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer, basking in the glory of his recent, fine Festen at the Royal Opera House. Never knew Turnage had a day job.

More burrowing. Rachael Hewer, (aka ”Roo” on her Instagram page), the director of A Visit to Friends, is Turnage’s partner. The co-dog handlers, Susan and Ian Hewer are clearly of the tribe.

As is Shosty, the stage dog, who behaved impeccably. Shosty hosts his/her own “wellness walkies” when not treading the boards as a thespian-pooch.

This opera, billed as a first effort for Matthews and Boyd, clearly had promising genes if even the dog handler was one of Britain’s foremost composers. And Roo is no slouch as a director. She self-describes as “A multi-award-winning opera director with absolutely no self-esteem”.

Clearly in line for the 2025 title, Self-Deprecator of the Year, at the October International Opera Awards jamboree in Athens, Roo numbers ENO, Glyndebourne, ROH, Garsington, Buxton among others, and a catalogue of extensive television and film work among her credits. The operatic genes of A Visit to Friends, must have been convincing for Roo to back it as a novice entry in the Aldeburgh 2025 stakes. Maybe this crew knew what they were doing.

Not wrong. Visit finished its 90-minute Snape Maltings outing triumphantly, to acclamation from a packed grandstand – a sell-out – proof that Matthews and Boyd could turn their already well-proven expertise as composer and wordsmith to a completely new genre. And shoot the lights out.

A Visit with Friends is based on a play by Anton Chekhov which was never included in his collected works because the author thought it too auto-biographical. About a man frightened off by the competing affections of two strong-minded women.

It was the precursor to The Cherry Orchard. Boyd, intrigued by the drama, incorporated it in his play, Longing, which enjoyed a sell-out run at Hampstead Theatre in 2013.

In 2019, he received an unsolicited letter from Matthews suggesting they co-operate in writing an opera. The duo hit it off over a lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club. I’ve never failed to hit anything off over lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club. It’s a “can do” sort of space.

Two decisions were, in my view, critical in bringing Visit successfully to the stage. Matthews decided to write the score steeped in the sound world of Alexander Scriabin, the “difficult” Russian composer and contemporary of Chekhov.

Boyd conceived a libretto based on blank verse, allowing the words to flow naturally for a singing voice. Would that some experienced librettists would take the hint.

Telling the story in elegant simplicity. For example, the character Vanessa singing about inner conflict:

In a dark wood,

still early in my life,

a strange man beckoned.

He seemed to want to lead me

On a road unbeckoned.

And I followed him slowly.

We came to a point

where the road divided.

Each way seemed ideal.

There is a hint of Robert Frost hanging in the air. A Road Not Taken. The clarity of expression is exquisite. The balance between “beckoned” and “unbeckoned,” two lines later, almost Shakespearean.

This style would prove essential in conveying the subtle nuances of the plot. No word uttered but that it was sung. Indeed, in future productions – and there surely will be many – I suggest an experiment. Abandon supertitles.

This is one of the few operas sung in English that really doesn’t need them. Every voice was left to occupy its comfort zone and the singers enunciated clearly. Phrasing had no awkward corners. Hard to believe that Boyd was writing for the human voice for the first time.

The sound world created by Matthews is luminous, riffing off Scriabin’s natural synaesthesia – seeing colour in music. Later Scriabin can be inaccessible, but in the period leading up to and including his second Piano Sonata, the troubled Russian created a lush, tonal and dramatic sound world.

To appreciate the point hit the above link for a performance by pianist Yevgeny Sudbin. In my opinion, one the most acute Scriabin exponents on today’s circuit.

And how better to tell Chekhov’s tale of troubled love than in the voice of a composer plagued with a similar dilemma. That would be Scriabin. Not Matthews. Scriabin visited Chekhov in Yalta. Maybe they compared notes on difficult romance.

The opera is based on the conceit that they composed an opera, which was lost and rediscovered in a dusty Moscow archive. Composer, Mr. No-Name.

Visit is an opera within an opera, showing the interactions between five real life characters who are preparing the opera and three of the characters who appear in it. Nadia, played by real life Natalie, Varia, by Vanessa and Misha, Marcus. You get the drift.

The other two characters in the rehearsals are Gregory, the Director, and Chris a repetiteur.

Richard Strauss played the “opera within an opera” card in Ariadne auf Naxos, milking every opportunity for conflict, confusion and thwarted passions. So, it’s a proven formula.

In Visit, Misha is a lawyer returning to a dilapidated country estate to sort out the affairs of Varia and Nadia, who are both in love with him.

It turns out that Rehearsal Marcus – Opera Misha - has not really bothered to bone up on the plot. Opera Varia was involved with Opera Misha years before. Opera Nadia was a little girl then but developed a crush on him.

The fun starts when it becomes obvious that the opera plot is mirrored in real life. Opera Misha has no room for love in his thinking, but is the same true for Rehearsal Marcus?

There is much toing and froing. Misha kissing Nadia, Varia catching them at it, In the garden, Varia wanting a kiss. Nadia, seeing them, spoiling her entrance by calling Misha “Marcus”. Dead giveaway.

Meanwhile, the hapless Director, Gregor, tries to keep emotions even. But the bust-up inevitably comes when Marcus decides to leave in reality. The girls are too hot to handle. Natalie and Marcus are dismissed by Gregor and the opera will have to be recast. Vanessa has the last word.

The staging of mayhem is never easy, but Hewer never missed a trick. Her characters’ every emotion was depicted in glance and action.

Designer, Leanne Vandenbussche, presented rotating scenery which moved between rehearsal room and stage. You almost always knew where you were. Except when the set was occasionally turned 90 degrees to the audience, when you may have been in either space. No-man’s land. By choice.

Slowly, the truth about the girls’ passion for Marcus overwhelmed the action – and the outcome was inevitable. No-one was gratified. The grit in the Chekhov oyster.

Varis/Vanessa was London-based German mezzo soprano, Lotte Betts Dean. She had truly mastered her dual role as the relationship with Marcus slowly fizzed out of control.

Nadia/Natalia was soprano Susanna Hurrell, playing two vulnerable characters sensitively and with a beautifully tempered voice.

Baritone Marcus Farnsworth sang Maisha/Marcus and successfully convinced the audience that he was a non-committal cad. In the opera – and in rehearsal. Gregor was sung by a convincingly baffled Edward Hawkins and Gary Matthewman, the repetiteur.

Jessica Cottis conducted the Aurora Orchestra and wrung everything from the Matthews’ Scriabin- inspired score. Wonderfully flowing and atmospheric.

I hope this opera is picked up by other houses. It is ideal for country house festivals looking for something different and enjoyable, but no mere froth. For it was fun with a serious purpose, punchily delivered with faultless skill.

And it would be nothing short of a tragedy if the Matthews and Boyd stellar opera debut proved to be also their swansong.

Boyd is fascinated by the power of music. One of my favourite novels of his, Love is Blind, is a historical yarn about Brodie Moncur, a Scottish piano tuner with Channon & Co, an Edinburgh firm of piano makers, who eventually peddled his skills across Europe and Asia. Music is the power that drives him on. I think Brodie should have a word in Will’s ear.

In the final scene, after we thought the opera faux and proper were both over, Vanessa is left alone to deliver an aria summing up her feelings.

Matthews and Boyd created one of those rare moments that makes the world stand still. Lotte Betts-Dean let rip her pent-up emotions. A climactic solo every bit as moving as Marietta’s iconic aria at the end of Erich Korngold’s opera, Die Tote Stadt.

Vanessa was gently led from the stage by Chekhov. Not a throat in the house could conceal a lump.

At the after-party I bumped into Mark-Anthony Turnage and congratulated him on his promotion from composer to dog handler. He was easy to spot, wearing his iconic hat. He generously claimed to have read the Reaction review of Festen – and to have liked it.

I waved at William Boyd across the stalls, renewing an acquaintance dating back to Glasgow University student days. At the party, reconnected with his wonderful wife, Susan, who I hadn’t seen for – ouch - 40 years!

As I turned north from rural Suffolk to the M1 and home in the Scottish Borders, I reflected, this time Aldeburgh had truly been a visit to friends.

The opening bars of Richard Wagner’s final masterpiece, Parsifal, form a monophony. One single, long, musical line shorn of harmony and counterpoint.

Totally unlike the brassy crash, bang wallop of the likes of Die Maestersinger, or Der fliegende Holländer. Wandering up and down the stave without resolution. Creating uncertainty.

Parsifal, twenty years in gestation, was to be different. The crowning achievement of a stellar career. In July 1882, as the curtain rose at Bayreuth, Wagner was drawing his audience into another reality.

A place where time and space became meaningless. A setting for his Bühnenweihfestspiel, “a festival play for the consecration of the stage”.

Drama, grandeur and spirituality would make Parsifal unique. You could worship only in Bayreuth. This was not just a trip to the opera. Wagner’s audiences were on pilgrimage.

He banned performances in any other opera house, a vetobroken only by New York’s Metropolitan Opera on Christmas Eve 1903, where some clever dick worked out the long reach of copyright did not apply.

This nose-thumb was an act of beautiful defiance that would make the newly self-appointed boss of Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts proud. Of course, only if Donald could take time out from his big military parade in Washington’s nearby Mall to pop in.

Wagner’s original intention was to torch Bayreuth after the first performance and never stage Parsifal again. Fortunately for history, Cosima, “I’m in charge of the dodgy Wagnerfamily budget,” had other ideas. It brought bums on Bayreuth seats. The Parsifal score and the theatre survived.

In 1914, when copyright eventually ran out in Europe, in the eight months before the outbreak of the First World War, fifty opera houses blazed the epic across the continent. The redemptive mystery of Parsifal swept all before it.

News of copyright expiration does not seem to have reached Glyndebourne, Sussex, England, where this summer is staged an opera bearing the Parsifal name, sounding like Wagner, but bearing only a passing resemblance to the original story.

Go on. Don’t be shy. You can show the real thing.

Directed by Jetske Mijnssen, who enjoys a reputation as a “psychological” director – with a bit a thing for Regietheater, i.e. ignoring composer’s wishes – this Glyndebourne Parsifalis a sad travesty. No story line goes unmauled.

For those unfamiliar with the mystical tale, a precis. There is a wandering swan-shooting knight, Parsifal, a perfect redemptive fool, who bumps into the Holy Grail Order, guardians of the cup that received Christ’s blood, in their mountain top temple, Monsalvat. And we go on from there. He shocks them by shooting their favourite swan with his bow and arrow.

The Knights are in conflict with an evil wizard, Klingsor – a disgruntled ex-knight - who steals a sword that pierced Christ’s side from the knight Amfortas, son of the King Titurel, then stabs him with it, leaving a septic wound.

Amfortas was being distracted by the sexy Kundry a wild woman who laughed at Christ on the Cross - obviously at least a thousand years old - but with a face-and-everything-lift courtesy of Klingsor. Come on, at the back! Keep up!

Parsifal resists the temptations of Kundry and assorted flower maidens, wrests the sword back from Klingsor, destroying his magic, then returns to Monsalvat to be hailed as King by Gurnemanz, a holy Knight of the Grail and sort of Master of Ceremonies.

Klingsor is healed, the sacrament of the Grail is administered to Kundry, allowing her to die reconciled to Christ. Eventually the ceremony of the Grail is shared with all the knights who are thus restored to tip top health.

For those unfamiliar with this simple tale, here is to be found the Holy Grail of a full synopsis.

It may sound like chaotic hokum but take it on trust from me that, for this opera to remain the dazzling mystery that Wagner intended, some plot essentials have to be observed.

Monsalvat cannot be a nondescript dining room in some rural parish church with the Knights kitted out as junior clerics. Then, when they are meant to be at their last gasp and on their financial uppers they can’t turn up at Titurel’s funeral parading around in well-tailored frockcoats and black lumhats.

This is how they were kitted out at Glyndebourne – and often located offstage. The setting was prosaic, not mystical.

Parsifal must return after besting Klingsor with thathumungous sword. Not a barely visible pen knife. Nor can the sword proper be impersonated by an unexplained supernumerary who embraces Amfortas in his pyjamas, healing the wound.

Presumably a clunky attempt to suggest that Amfortas was really healed by “fellowship”. Not that horrid sword thing. Ugh!

Kundry must die to make any sense of her character and back story. Condemned to eternal torment because she laughed at Christ on the cross, she craves the release of death, not to stump off as a rejuvenated 1,000-year-old freak show!

Then there is the minor detail of the Holy Grail. Where was it? There was a mysterious, nondescript box lying beside Amfortas’ bed, which was opened and closed to little effect. Just didn’t hack it. Indiana Jones and the Surprisingly Small Box would not have packed them into cinemas. Nor did it make sense at Glyndebourne.

What on earth was Stephen Langridge, Glyndebourne’s Artistic Director, smoking when he had the initial commissioning discussions with Mijnssen, presumably years ago?

It is one thing to subtly bring a masterpiece up to date. Temple Music’s recent semi-staging of Act III of Parsifal at Temple Church directed by Julia Burbach, in which members of the public processed and were then transformed into Grail Knights provided present day relevance while preserving the mystery of the story intact.

It is another to twist an opera, to meet a director’s whim, out of all recognition.

Fly on the wall. I imagine the original Langridge/Mijnssen conversation, perhaps in the Glyndebourne Long Bar, unfolding thus:

“So, no sword. You think a penknife will cut it?” “Not just a penknife, there’s a big guy who’ll give Amfortas a hug.” “Why?” “Meghan Markle’s on a healing journey. Catch the wave.”

“And how does Kundry die again?” “She doesn’t, she just slopes off”. “But, redeemed, of course?” “No, she just slopes off.”

“And will the Knights gather round The Holy Grail at the end in a triumph of redemption?” “Nah! We’ll keep them offstage. I’ve got a wee Scottish quaich that’ll do for the Grail”.

“What do you think about staging a Gotterdammerung next season where it all ends well?” “Up for that! Oh, and can I have my penknife back after the last Parsifal?”

That apart, how went the rest of the show? Robin Ticciati,Glyndebourne’s musical director of ten years standing was in the pit, delivering a perfectly paced score. His sound world evoked all the mystery the staging lacked. Fabulous sound world.

The orchestra was The London Philharmonic. They and the chorus had depth and sensitivity. The enigmatic music lines need careful handling if the meaning is not to be blurred. This was a highly skilled performance all round.

Kundry was strongly sung and superbly acted – unfortunately as directed - by Kristina Stanek, projecting a potent mixture of passive-aggressive surliness and desperate sexuality.

But she was never allowed to portray the historically doomed character who laughed at Jesus. Just a young girl having the odd hissy fit, then hanging around like an unwanted spare.

John Relyea sang the long-suffering Gurnemanz, Audun Iversen, the anguished Amfortas. Ryan Speedo Green proved a volatile Klingsor.

Daniel Johansson was an over emollient Parsifal. He did not quite come up to the mark when he returns in Act III, a fool no more. Nice guy, shame about the sword. His voice lacked the tortured intensity of a Jonas Kaufman, who took on the role at the Met from 2012 until 2020.

The Francois Girard production, available on HD, was also psychologically devastating. Capturing perfectly the other world Wagner had in mind.

Parsifal is not for the faint-hearted opera goer. It needs a bit of homework to understand what Wagner is trying to achieve. But it is worth the effort, to even catch a glimpse of Wagner’s wonder world.

The main trick for any production is to transport the audience to Wagner’s mystical 12^th century world, inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem Parzival. Unusually, Glyndebourne let us down, leaving the audience bewildered.

And Another, Scottish, Thing!

Jamie MacDougall, The Scottish tenor with a glowing track record as soloist and a Scottish Opera regular, is coming to London. Hoxton Music Hall to be precise, on Sunday 22 June with his Harry Lauder Show.

This year it’s the 155th birthday of Scotland’s greatest troubadour, who conquered America with A Wee Deoch An’ Doris and Keep Right on to the End of the Road. I asked for a Deoch An’ Doris in the Tap Room at The University Club of New York recently. Sid, the barman, shook his head.

This is a musical play about Sir Harry Lauder’s life, filled with songs, familiar as 78rpm shellack records played on your granny’s wind-up gramophone.

The play is an adaptation of an original by the celebrated Scottish comedian, actor and Glasgow theatre owner, Jimmy Logan. Not only will it be a glimpse of the past, it willcertainly be delivered with the vim and vigour MacDougall brings to all his roles.

He’s also singing in a Holland Park Gilbert and Sullivan double bill at the end of June.

Pick up your knobbly walking stick and a slice of music hall history at Hoxton Music Hall on the 22nd. Proceeds go to Erskine Hospital, the Scottish Veterans’ Charity, as do all Lauder’s royalties. Grab your tickets now.

Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult, an opera by American Israeli composer Avner Dorman, had its UK premiere at Longborough Festival Opera on 27 May. It was a high-risk departure for the company, widely acknowledged as the Bayreuth of Britain.

To forge that reputation over thirty years, Longborough has performed cutting-edge Wagner operas from a chicken shed in a hill fold in the Cotswolds. It had seemed, until now, a good plan to stage, well… operas by the great man. Hardly an original strategy.

After their acclaimed 2024 Ring Cycle delivered by director Amy Lane, Longborough decided not to rest on laurels, but to strike out for a new, controversial shore. Address, head on, Wagner’s dubious legacy after his death in 1883, its manipulation by his widow, Cosima, their complex son, Siegried, and a random Englishman.

For, added to the Bayreuth melting pot came the bizarre, opportunistic Brit, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a butterfly-catching tourist cuckoo in the Wagner nest. He eventually married Eva, the composer’s daughter. Sprinkle a little Longborough magic. Hey presto! An unusually gripping account of the domestic affairs of the widow Cosima and her family.

This Wagner reality saga outshone in every way the Netflix Succession fictional series focused on Logan Roy and the struggle for control of his media giant, Wayco Roystar. For starters, Hitler did not feature in Succession. He does in Wahnfried. Kitted out in red clown pompoms in the final scenes.

Some housekeeping, for transparency’s sake. I enjoy assisting Longborough in a voluntary role, as their US Ambassador, drumming up support across the Atlantic. I have a Schnauzer in this fight. Nonetheless, I shall strive to shine on Wahnfried a disinterested eye.

The name of the Wagner family villa, Wahnfried, translates as Freedom from delusion. Wishful thinking. This a far cry from a more traditional choice for retired intellectual musicians, perhaps, Duncomposin. The very name of the house points to an ongoing Wagner project and a perceptive premonition that his mission would not end with his death. Merely shapeshift to a different form. A cult.

When I first heard that Longborough was taking on Dorman’s opera, premiered at Karlsruhe in 2017, my native Scottish sceptical reaction was “I hae ma doots!” Why should a small, niche house like Longborough risk its hard-won reputation on a throw of the dice?

Understatement. Dorman pulls no punches with Wahnfried. More like rushing headlong into a fin de siècle minefield littered with Wagner family unexploded devices. “Don’t step on that anti-Jewish essay on music!” “Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is armed with a Teutonic supremacy anti-handling device”. “That corporal, Adolf, will be popping round for tea”.

I think the Longborough balance of judgement came down to this. Having established unshakeable credentials for performance, it was important to sustain the intellectual credentials of the house by contributing to the ever-evolving debate about Wagner’s influence, not just on the world of his era, but up to the present day. Opera being Longborough’s language, it was time to speak.

Dorman’s Wahnfried speaks in the voice of the burlesque. A rapid-fire sequence of twenty scenes, each self-contained, flagged up on a blackboard. The audience knows what they’re getting.

The work pulses. Think Berthold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Although the subject matter is deadly serious, Dorman and his librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz avoid the trap of piety.

With the help of two outrageous, invented characters. The Wagner-Daemon, a haunting, violently lime-green-clad ghost of the composer, complete with comically exaggerated posing pouch, returned to keep an eye on his inheritance. And Hermann Levi, the Jewish maestro who conducted the premiere of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882.

They were there to keep an eye on Chamberlain, who was intent on moulding the Wagner cult to fit his distorted historical view.

What happens? Act I

The action opens in the early 1880s. Germany is newly unified. The British natural scientist Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his German wife Anna lark about, catching and studying butterflies whilst on holiday.

Chamberlain is the British tenor Mark Le Brocq, who delivers a towering performance. From the innocent, clumsy lepidopterist on his hols, he morphs before our eyes into the opportunist who will steer the Wagner heritage towards his own fantasy land.

Initially, Houston even struggles to speak German. Anna has to speak for him until he resolves to learn the language and shapeshift to a German identity. Anna is sung by soprano Meeta Raval.

The Chamberlains arrive at Bayreuth, butterfly nets and all. Houston falls in love with Wagner’s music. He meets other Wagnerian acolytes becoming a superfan.

After being unceremoniously divorced in the Anna role by Chamberlain, Raval spookily evolves into Eva Wagner, who he marries to embed himself into the household. More properly, Eva’s surname is von Bülow, as she was conceived by Richard and Cosima while she was still married to Hans von Bülow.

When Wagner dies in 1883, widow Cosima enlists Houston to help her preserve the composer’s legacy for the world. As the Wagnerians speak of Richard Wagner’s immortality, the Wagner-Daemon is born.

Cosima was stately soprano, Susan Bullock. Who sweeps everything before her, even when standing still. A Longborough fixture, she dominated the stage as the determined widow. Even the Wagner-Daemon shook in its shoes!

In 1899, Houston writes The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which becomes a bestseller. There is an apposite reminder of Chamberlain’s lepidoptery days, a beautifully crafted display case replete with pinned specimens with pride of place in the drawing room.

History has written Chamberlain off as a bit of a twat. Take care. Foundations ran to eight editions, selling more than a quarter of a million copies by 1938 and was de rigueur in the bookcase of any self-respecting SS officer. Or, at least, a useful doorstop.

It runs beyond 600 pages. I downloaded a pdf copy and waded in. The introduction by Lord Redesdale alone was a 50-hairpin mountainous uphill struggle. By page 43 I found myself asleep at the wheel and veered off-piste, only to plunge into another abyss, the author’s introduction. Another 50 ‘virages en épingles’ journey of twists and turns.

But enough of the essence rubbed off to get the point that Chamberlain’s task was to underpin his antisemitic view of history with seemingly valid academic credentials. Far from being written out of history. Chamberlain needs to be called out.

The Wagner-Daemon is joined by the spirit of Hermann Levi, the Jewish conductor who premiered Parsifal. He constantly challenges the racist ideas embedded in Houston’s book.

Stroll on. Now a famous writer, Houston meets Kaiser Wilhelm II. Houston grows ever closer with the all-powerful matriarch, Cosima Wagner. Chamberlain works with Cosima to purify the history of Richard Wagner’s life.

Cosima and Houston embark on a clean-up operation. Inconveniently, Wagner was a bovver-boy of the 1848 failed revolution. His early letters dating from his revolutionary period which clash with the desired conservative narrative of the German meister, are dumped as inconvenient, a precursor of 1930s Nazi book burnings.

Houston’s influence continues to grow, and he marries Eva, Cosima and Richard Wagner’s youngest daughter. There is a wonderful surtitle which pops on screen. “Houston, we have a problem.”

Act II

Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner struggles as Houston insists that Siegfried’s homosexuality is hidden. Siegfried’s operas are critically panned; the family dismisses these critiques as a smear from the ‘Jewish’ press.

Meanwhile, Cosima and Richard’s oldest daughter Isolde (born while Cosima was still married to Hans von Bülow), fights for her son and Wagner’s first grandchild Franz Wilhelm Beidler to inherit the festival. Instead, Cosima banishes them from Wahnfried.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain is increasingly frail. He is haunted by the Wagner-Daemon and the ghost of Hermann Levi.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Houston hopes for a German victory. He resorts to antisemitic conspiracy theories to explain Germany’s defeat.

Cosima’s wish that Siegfried marry is granted when he marries Winifred Williams; they have four children in quick succession, shifting the power dynamics within the Wagner clan.

Wahnfried feels Germany’s post-war economic decline. In 1923, there is a knock at the door. The Wagners welcome an unknown Austrian soldier into their home. This soldier is passionate about Richard Wagner, his music, and a new future for Germany. Guess who?

As Houston dies, he prepares to be celebrated amongst the German greats. However, the Wagner-Daemon tells him he has misunderstood. He is a mere footnote in history. But for the audience, an awful warning, not to be ignored.

That the story, with all its twists and turns, was an immersive, enthralling experience is down to Director Polly Graham and the whole Longborough backstage team. Make no mistake, this was as difficult to stage convincingly as any Wagner opera.

Don’t take it from me. I was accompanied by a friend from New York. Happens to be a “big wheel” in the world of Broadway, and a fellow member of the Metropolitan Opera Club.

I was leery of his reaction. I need not have feared. He was astonished that Longborough had attempted the seemingly impossible, was initially sceptical of the outcome, but returned to London a convert. Dorman’s Wagner-Daemon had worked its magic. Upping Longborough’s game.

The extensive coverage following the death of Loretta Swit is a testament to the 87-year-old actress’s charm and talent. It also celebrates the enduring cultural impact of some situation comedies which were truly “broadcast” on terrestrial television in the closing decades of the last century.

Swit, pronounced “sweet”, played chief nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, set in an American mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. The show was first screened in 1972 when the United States forces were fighting the Vietnam War. After 256, mainly 30-minute episodes, the feature-length finale in 1983, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen remains the most watched television show broadcast in the US, (except for Super Bowls since 2010), garnering an audience of 106 million in its home market.

The TV show was the second screen adaptation drawn from 1968’s MASH – A Novel about Three Doctors, written under a pseudonym by a surgeon who had served in the Korean War. The book owes something to Joseph Heller’s 1961 Second World War satirical masterpiece Catch-22.

M*A*S*H the movie came first, in 1970. It was billed as a black comedy, identified with the anti-Vietnam War movement. The caustic Robert Altman directed a screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. who had been blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy Era.

The film was a hit and initially banned from being shown in US Military cinemas. It won the main prize at the Cannes Festival and an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould and Robert Duvall starred. Sally Kellerman played “Hot Lips”.

As Altman satirised in a later film, The Player, the 70s and 80s were an era when few big screen actors deigned to grace the small screen. Gary Burghoff, who played the camp’s likeable nerd “Radar”, was the only main character who made the transfer to TV, along with an instrumental version of the film’s title song, Suicide is Painless.

The rights were owned by 20th Century Fox who went ahead with the TV series using some of the same main set. Two comedy writers, Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, took charge of development. CBS television showed M*A*S*H in prime time in the US, as did the BBC in the UK.

Robert Altman dismissed the TV version as the “antithesis of what we were trying to do” in the film. The series is lighter and more forgiving but it is still dark, seldom losing sight of its, largely off-screen, context: a war in which combatants and civilians were being killed and maimed and in which young American men were drafted to serve, like it or not. Swit insisted the overwhelming message of the show was always “war sucks”.

The horrors of war are more present in M*A*S*H than in the equivalent British sit coms which also explore humanity in times of conflict such as Allo Allo, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Dads Army.

The change in style from the film is obvious in the switch from baleful Donald Sutherland to Alan Alda who took over the lead character Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce Jnr. The part made Alda a major star. In a profile of the 87-year actor, director, writer, presenter last month in The Guardian, Alda’s “Hawkeye” is summed up as “a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, war-hating, wisecracking surgeon, brimming with principle and soul.”

Major Houlihan is Hawkeye’s antagonist; she is also the only main, or indeed regular, female character. She is a patriotic career member of the military and a disciplinarian. She is also a hypocrite, conducting an affair with a married senior officer.

Swit and Alda stuck with the Series for the full eleven years. After the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, the scripts became more character-based and focussed on generalised anti-war themes. Alda wrote some episodes and directed 32 of them, more than anyone else.

Swit developed the character of “Hot Lips” as well, she became more nuanced and sympathetic, and a fierce feminist who dresses down a male officer: “I’m just as much a major as any other major. You’ll notice these leaves come in gold, not pink for girls and blue for boys.” For all its street-cred, M*A*S*H the film has a male gaze. In a famous scene, Major Houlihan played by Sally Kellerman appears nude after her shower stall is demolished around her in a prank. Altman distracted Kellerman from crouching down to take cover immediately by having other actors pop up naked by the camera. The film historian Danielle Ryan comments that then it was all seen as “a raunchy joke”, while “this entire situation sounds like a lawsuit these days”.

In the movie, “Hot Lips” is a blond bombshell and a target of spite. Loretta Swit was a more nuanced beauty, everyday rather than glamour magazine. In step with changing attitudes in her most famous role on TV, the actress became a career woman in her own right as the show wore on. In the later episodes, she even insisted on downplaying her nickname. In this century, Swit gave a famous rendition of The Vagina Monologues on the London stage before turning to activism on Animal rights.

Hot Lips may out-rank Hawkeye but traditional gender stereotypes are preserved on the show, as they were in real life in Korean and Vietnamese field hospitals. Captain Pierce is the doctor and Major Houlihan the nurse.

Just as M*A*S*H is set in Korea, not Vietnam, nobody would try to make a comedy set against the conflicts now raging. The hospitals operating in Gaza are rightly only the subject of news reports and documentaries. It is striking how many of the doctor volunteers today are women. Even so, for some of the women medical staff in the war zone, TV Hot Lips may perhaps have been a role model and early inspiration.

M*A*S*H is still remembered more for the TV series than the film. Altman, Sutherland, Gould, and Kellerman went on to bigger and better film work. The eleven years as Hawkeye and Hot Lips are definitive in the long careers of Alan Alda and Loretta Swit.

Their show made Americans – and British audiences – think about the implications for themselves of the Vietnam war. In popular terms M*A*S*H contributed to defining an era for the better. There is no equivalent programme to entertain so constructively today, nor an unfragmented mass audience to watch it.

As Sir Stephen Fry, the MC – and so much more – of a lively team of talent, gathered to celebrate the life of literary giant Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, drew the evening’s organised riot at Wilton’s Music Hall to a close, he, then the whole cast turned to the stage and looked up.

Projected across the arched space above was a huge black and white photo of Plum, his wife Ethel and a favourite dog. In a sylvan setting, possibly shot in the gardens of Lord Emsworth’s Blandings Castle. Certainly, we had travelled there in our minds.

The intensity of the audience’s reception rose in a hallooing crescendo not out of place in a Drones Club bread-roll battle. The photo slowly transformed. Infused with increasingly vibrant colour, it seemed to respond to the warmth of sentiment in the room. Forging an enduring connection between every member of the audience and the great author they were there to celebrate.

Amy Lane, Director of proceedings, Charlie Morgan-Jones, Lighting Designer, and Ben Bull, Video Designer, had pulled off a cunning wheeze worthy of Jeeves himself. Clearly, they had been eating oodles of bally pilchards. To improve the brainpower. Not surprising. Lane thinks hard about “take your breath away” moments in every opera she directs.

Be it the conclusion of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, the finale of Longborough Festival’s Ring Cycle, or Gounod’s Faust in Canadian Opera’s Toronto production there is always a “Lane” moment of the, “just when you think it’s all over” sort. She bangs another surprise into the back of the net.

Department of explanation. Plum? Probably every reader knows this. I, a Wodehouse fan, shamefully did not. “Plum” is an affectionate corruption of Wodehouse’s first name, “Pelham”. Go on. Repeat “Pelham” increasingly quickly, sotto voce. You’ll get the drift.

Wodehouse married Ethel Wayman in 1914. Tragically twice widowed, Ethel had a daughter, Leonora, from her first marriage to whom Woodhouse was devoted. She married Peter Cazalet in 1932 and died tragically in 1944. Plum and Ethel had no children of their own. So, the Cazalet family down the generations became custodians of the Wodehouse literary estate.

And, fortuitously for the Wilton’s audience, the Cazalets were determined to share the opportunity “for Plum’s words to shine” in speech and song, to benefit The National Literacy Trust. Last year the trust reported that children and young people’s book reading had fallen to the lowest level in two decades. Still much Wodework to be done.

The history of Wilton’s Music Hall dates back to the 1690s. The current premises in Grace’s Alley, Whitechapel, were built in 1859. Presumably they were decorated then, but do not seem to have benefited from even a lick of paint since. Paint does not feature in the jolly old Wilton’s vocab. Grade II listed, “patina” and “distressed” cannot do justice to the space. Amazing to discover that new-fangled invention, electric light, is tolerated.

Fabulous atmosphere. OperaGlass Works staged their scary, filmed version of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in the haunting space in 2021. Peter Quint, the opera’s spectral presence, was at home amongst the crumbly plaster.

The evening was hosted by Sir Stephen Fry, in top self-deprecating form. Referring to the long overdue award of a knighthood to Plum, only a month before his death in 1975, Fry wryly ruminated. “In those days knighthoods were awarded for services of value”.

We were in for an evening of non-stop burlesque, minus any ludicrous treatment of the principal character, Plum. Fry was the MC, holding a fireside chat conversation with Plum about his life. Alexander Armstrong played Plum and characters from the Woodhouse oeuvre were brought on to engage in a biographical dialogue and present short readings.

Stephen Mangan delivered a heroically goofy Bertie Wooster, gazing out at the audience with an air of vacancy and drop-jawed innocence. Miss Baby Sol, vocalist, songwriter and powerhouse performer in every way, introduced us to glorious songs by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Kern and Novello, led by The Simon Back Quartet, perched backstage.

Lyrics, of course, by Wodehouse. More aware of his talents as an author, rather than lyricist, I was fascinated to learn how Wodehouse musicals dominated pre-war Broadway. At one point there were five shows running simultaneously featuring Woodhouse lyrics.

He coined shedloads of moolah and then went on to Hollywood to make barnloads more. The offers started at $2,000 a week ($8,000 in today’s spondulix). Then, Sam Goldwyn, the on-screen roaring lion, coughed up $2,500 a week. At the top of his writing game, Plum was, in own words, “finally in the chips”.

In Act One songs ranged from Anything Goes, performed by the ensemble to Church Around the Corner sung by Sophie-Louise Dann, musical theatre star and Armstrong, the absolutely everything of screen theatre and airwaves. Act Two topped out with The Land Where the Good Songs Go, featuring Hal Cazalet, a British tenor with an Atlantic spanning career and the Full Company.

Worth mentioning that there was a memorable cast of Cazalets involved in the bally show. Hal, David, and actress Lara. Their palpable enthusiasm for the evening turned a top class show into a family event. Introduced briefly to David as the babbling crowds drifted homewards it was not obvious that he would soon descend from that cloud nine to which the evening had transported him.

Piers Torday, the children’s writer, devised the evening. Familiar with the venue – his adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights first ran there in 2017 and has since been revived – his new “Box of Delights” suited the space well, was inspirational, emotional, hilarious and educational. What more can an evening dedicated to supporting literacy have hoped for?

Elephants in the room were embraced, invited to sit down with a comforting cup of tea and tell their story. In 1941, Wodehouse found himself in hot water. Interned by the Germans, he made five broadcasts from Germany and was immediately characterised as just another Lord Haw-Haw, a Nazi stool pigeon.

Wodehouse, a man who was patriotic down to his stapes, the smallest bone in his body, was appalled. Conceding that the very fact of having broadcast from enemy territory was, perhaps ill considered, the content of the broadcasts was well considered indeed.

Plum-full of well-concealed irony aimed at his Nazi captors, fortunately they were too bombastic to get the point. Goebbels didn’t do irony! If he had Wodehouse would probably have been shot.

At the end of the war, Colonel Edward Cussen of MI5 flew to Paris to question Wodehouse. He concluded that “a jury would find difficulty in convicting him of an intention to assist the enemy”. Cussen, a lawyer, went on to be judge.

During a celebration of a life, A Homage to Happiness, it would have been all too easy to ignore the Wodehouse elephant and focus on the good times. The evening would have been diminished.

Fry could not resist slipping, occasionally, into the character of Jeeves, a role he and Denis Price before him perfected in two hugely successful comedy series. BBC’s The World of Wooster 1965-67 – starring Ian Carmichael as Bertie, with Price as Jeeves. And ITV’s Jeeves and Wooster 1990-93 with Hugh Lawrie as Wooster and Fry playing Jeeves.

“I say Jeeves what is all that bally rot about me being on television?”

“I believe, sir, that reference is being made to an allegedly comedic programme about the occasional escapades of a gentleman and his valet, much beloved by the viewing classes with more common tastes”.

“What Ho! Jeeves. Would Aunt Agatha like it?”

“I fear not sir. Mrs Gregson is not known to be in favour of light entertainment in general”.

I was resolutely in favour of Plum, A Homage to Happiness, leaving Wilton’s with an optimistic spring in my step, veritably bouncing up Leman Street to Aldgate East tube station, inspired by the Wodehouse life about which I had, until then, known too little. “Pip! Pip!”