A riveting one-man bio-drama about fulfilling potential, lost creatives, and the power of the artistic spirit.
I’ll be honest. Before I walked into the King’s Head Theatre to watch Mark Farrelly’s epic performance, I’d never heard of Derek Jarman. Now? I’m going to tell everyone about him.
A touching piece about what it means to choose to be a maverick rather than a conformist, Jarman—the vital story of the life of the eponymous film director, stage designer, author and gay rights activist—is a perfect fit for the theatre’s Boys! Boys! Boys! season. Farrelly’s writing dances between the poetic and the blunt, the welcoming and the acerbic. It’s a style that works for such a show, and for such a man, and carries the audience through the ecstatic joy and then jarringly into the cold light of day.
The journey is a moving one, and is delivered with the importance of someone who knows their time will end too soon. Farrelly makes impressive use of the minimal set and props at his disposal, occasionally requiring the audience’s involvement, to give us a glimpse of the almost-childlike creativity of the man, and is supported well by Tom Lishman’s sound design to immerse us in the world. Indeed, Farrelly and his co-director, Sarah-Louise Young, deserve huge respect for the incredible consideration that has clearly been poured into every choice. The whole show is a carefully-crafted homage, in ways a novice like me only realised after the fact but that resonated strongly at the time with much of the audience.
Which is to say that the whole team clearly gets Jarman, none more so than Farrelly who is an absolute tour de force. Eighty minutes with nowhere to hide is no easy feat but he exudes a charisma and aliveness that holds the audience in his palm, hoping to be the next one he talks to. He jumps from moment to moment with a masterful subtlety and grace, all the while throwing in ad libs that ground the show firmly in the present, and by the time he reaches the harrowing moments when the AIDS-related illness is about to kill him, we really don’t want him to go.
It’s a show about art and the potential of storytelling, both in how we deliver those stories and in whose stories we choose to tell. There are traps that are easy to fall into in a project like this—a lack of spontaneity and a wealth of indulgence being two obvious ones—but Farrelly ably avoids these for the most part. I’m in two minds about one-man shows ending with a slightly more on-the-nose reiterating of their message, but Jarman earns it.
It’s an important story. An audience member after the show told of how moving it was to see something they lived through being told in such an alive and moving way. Farrelly’s Jarman talks of those illiterate in human complexity. Unfortunately, those people will continue to exist, but this production is a testament to art’s power to combat such ignorance with unabashed spirit. Be astonishing, is Jarman’s appeal to us. The show lives up to its challenge.