The Arts Dispatch

I hear from a friend of a friend that John Berkavitch, this year’s poet-in-residence at Glastonbury Festival 2025, will be performing a newly minted poem on the Greenpeace stage before Libertine Pete(r) Doherty takes the stage for a solo performance. Making the short walk across from the Circus Big Top, it proves to be a solid tip-off when Berkavitch is introduced.

At 12:58 (timings in Poetry&Words are very precise) on the Saturday of the festival, two minutes before Rizzle Kicks take to the Other Stage, I take my place for the annual Poetry&Words Open Mic. Hosted this year by Tyrone Lewis, the Open Mic provides the opportunity for the more poetic amongst this year’s festival-goers to make their Glastonbury Festival debut. Anyone can sign up and entrants were required to add their name to the performers list from 11am on Friday.

Lucie Jones brought musical theatre to Glastonbury Festival for the first time in the festival’s 50-plus-year history. The singer’s roles have included both Cossette and Fantine in Les Misérables, the lead role of Jenna in Waitress and Elphaba in Wicked – all in the West End – as well as performances in We Will Rock You, Legally Blonde, Rent and Ghost the Musical.

By day, the Poetry&Words tent hosts spoken word, performance poetry, theatre, open mics, and poetry slams. By night, the mood in the tent changes entirely: rebranded as Mavericks, it becomes a cabaret venue full of the weird and wonderful side of the festival’s Theatre & Circus offerings. Acts that during the day can be found in Cabaret, the Circus Big Top, the Astrolabe Theatre and beyond can be spotted in Mavericks performing their more experimental or risqué material.

Missy Impossible’s A Little More Sensation set demonstrates her incredible skills as Ireland’s only female sword swallower. It’s a slick, well-rehearsed street-style show that has been lovingly crafted and honed so that Missy Impossible has the audience’s full attention for the show’s entirety – whether it’s jokes or action that draws them. ‘Are you videoing?’ she asks one audience member with a phone in their hand as the show reaches its climax.

Charlotte May is adding a little bit of glamour to Crooners Corner on the opening day of Glastonbury Festival, dressed in a shimmering silver-tasselled top over a classic red dress, accessorised with a French fan that she’s putting to work – a necessary accessory in the heat and humidity of this year’s festival. She captures a small crowd of by-passers from the stream of festival-goers arriving laden with gear, heading to find their pitch in the busy camping fields that have sprung to life.

Grace Billings’ Australian lifeguard is here to keep us safe – she’s a lifesaver, after all. Or, more specifically, a lifeguard on the ‘green waters of Glastonbury.’ Combining circus skills with family comedy, Billings even adds a science expert to the entertainment as she demonstrates centrifugal force with a pair of buckets, which, in true clowning fashion doesn’t go entirely well.

‘Avoid eye contact and do jazz clicking instead,’ Mama Tokus suggests to passersby as they file past heading from Bella’s Field towards the Circus field or in the other direction over Bella’s Bridge. The challenge for any Crooner’s Corner performer is to capture an audience somehow that perhaps hadn’t intended to take 30 or 40 minutes out of their day to watch jazz standards, which makes audience engagement one of the key skills for a performer here – alongside the obvious vocal requirements.

James B Partridge’s nostalgia-filled set, Primary School Bangers, went somewhat viral after last year’s festival with videos of Glastonbury revellers singing along to well-known hymns for their school days – as if back in the assembly hall but more enthusiastic about their vocal performance.

We venture out of the Theatre & Circus fields briefly on the second day of the festival for Seanchoíche, an Irish storytelling event – its name combines the Irish words for ‘storyteller’ and ‘night’ – that began in Dublin and has since started regular events globally, including Limerick, Belfast, London, Manchester, Amsterdam, Sydney, Melbourne, Cape Town, Los Angeles and New York. Now, it makes its Glastonbury debut on the festival’s Greenpeace stage.