Usually the go-to place for intimate cabaret, Crazy Coqs was the home last night for Mark Farrelly‘s play, Jarman, about the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman who died from AIDS complications at age 52.
Staged in the week of World AIDS Day, and raising awareness and donations for the Terrence Higgins Trust, Jarman is a solo piece from a Jarman telling us about his life as he prepares to cross into “heaven”s garden, where children of all races play together happily.”
Abused by the nuns who educate him, and the father who doesn’t understand him, young Derek is attracted to beauty in all its forms, from the sky, his garden in Dungeness, and the image on a screen, to a boy who looks like a statue in an anonymous gay club loo.
Farrelly, aided by director Sarah-Louise Young, brings all the complexity of the character to his piece, with just a chair and a white sheet as a prop. The child who likes to play with other boys becomes the artist with a touch of the devil in him.
Feeding off the influence of large personalities like Gielgud and Ken Russell, for whom he designed sets before making his own films, Jarman becomes a visionary who battles against the ravages of illness and treatment to settle with death on his own terms.
The audience are not forgotten, either in fleeting moments of touch ot a shared minute of introspection at our own mortality. There are moments that verge on the artistic with torch or wrapping. It’s a play of vision and movement.
Farrelly is both funny and desperately moving in a portrayal of a man who seeks to fully understand a world before he leaves it all too soon. He brings us quick sketches of his last lover, Keith Collins, aka HB (‘Hinney Beast’), and of friends and collaborators like Tilda Swinton.
There is music, too, with Roberta Flack soundtracking a crisis and a lost home, and Erasure a call for the respect any person is due. And colours, notably blue, but also magenta, green and red.
The artist at his canvas, at his camera, or at his flower beds. The pleasure of connection, the love of life. You don’t have to know Jarman or his films to appreciate this play, but if you do, an extra layer is added.
Jarman played at Crazy Coqs on 4 Dec. For more on Mark Farrelly, go here.
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