Review: JARMAN by Mark Farrelly at Jack Studio Theatre, Brockley 10 to 14 May 2022

‘Farrelly brings back to vibrant life an iconoclast, an artist, a man who lived each day as if it were his last’ ★★★★

The British film industry more or less died in the 1970s. The twitching corpses of the once vibrant Hammer and Carry On franchises breathed their last. In one year, the top-grossing movie was a spin-off of the TV sitcom On The Buses. 

But the isle, as ever, was full of noises, and rustling in the undergrowth were free spirits like Derek Jarman, somehow raising the cash to make rambling incoherent pictures that once seen were never forgotten, scorching into the mind of the viewer, say, the arrow-raddled body of St Sebastian, or Queen Elizabeth I in full finery astride a post-apocalyptic docklands landscape.

Mark Farrelly’s one-man show relives the life – unloved middle-class childhood, art school, film-maker, artist, gardener and activist for, among other things, gay rights. HIV claimed Jarman in 1994, aged 52, and one of the many points of Farrelly’s show is that AIDs, though largely forgotten, still hasn’t gone.

80 minutes, on the advance publicity, looks like a long time to spend in the company of one person. The time flies, though – Jarman had no time to waste, even as time wasted him. Plotwise, it’s a fairly straightforward chronological sprint through escape from conformity to art school, a big break set-designing for Ken Russell’s The Devils (one of the most visually striking truly terrible British movies of the late 1960s) and somehow persuading a producer to fund a beautiful, homoerotic Sebastiane with an incomprehensible script entirely in Latin, seen by virtually no-one, but idolised by those precious few, until Channel 4 was invented in 1984 and opened it and much of the rest of Jarman’s ouevre to insomniac teenagers such as your reviewer.

Farrelly prowls a stage empty bar a chair, a sheet and a roll of paper, swooping and diving as Jarman’s moods alter, surprising with darts into an audience sometimes required to be his props, employing light, darkness and silence in a craftily choreographed set of effects. Jarman’s pleasure in surprise, indeed in life itself, flows from his playful, fluid, moving performance.

If there’s a flaw in the show it’s probably the flaw, if flaw it is, in Jarman’s own tempestuous work – it’s not likely to appeal much to anyone who’s never heard of him, and it may be that the range and cultural influence of his life’s work or his joy in it wouldn’t be entirely apparent to the uninformed viewer. 

But if that is a flaw at all, it goes with the subject. Commercial work was never Jarman’s thing (although millions more people saw his videos for the likes of the Pet Shop Boys than ever saw any of his feature films, without ever knowing he was behind those cameras, too – a subset of his work not overtly referred to here).

Farrelly brings back to vibrant life an iconoclast, an artist, a man who lived each day as if it were his last and without concern for what others might think of him or of his vision. The joy of a life well lived informs the show. The necessary skate through his work is enough to revive its great moments (and, perhaps, its sometimes awful quarter hours) in the memories of those of us who marvelled, puzzled and marvelled once more at something unique in our cinescape. Derek Jarman, had he lived, would be 80 now. That’s a lot of films we lost.

JARMAN by Mark Farrelly

Director: Sarah-Louise Young

Jack Studio Theatre, Brockley 10 to 14 May 2022

Box Office: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/brockleyjackstudio/

Phone: 0333 666 3366

Reviewer:

David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London – winner of the Write Now Festival prize). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.