Review: Jarman - a solo show by Mark Farrelly at The Playhouse, Sheffield

But just like Derek Jarman, the subject of his play, Sheffield born-and-bred writer and actor Mark Farrelly is a painter – with words – and his script is so evocative you can picture each scene in your mind.

‘Mink. Chink. Drink,’ says Farrelly as the gay pioneer and filmmaker Jarman, knocking back an imagined glass of champagne to invoke his parents’ stifling 1950s dinner parties, their guests photographed stiffly around the dining table with fixed, forced smiles, suppressing a post-war misery.

As he writhes in a mix of agony and ecstasy to a soundtrack of pulsating 1980s synth-pop, his words and physical movement transport us to the sights and sounds of the throbbing gay clubs of neon-lit Soho.

As he points with a childlike delight at the remembered colours of the flowers, chartreuse and cerulean, in his driftwood garden, we are swept to the shingle shoreline of desolate Dungeness in Kent where, in the 90s, Jarman created Prospect Cottage, his coastal home and sanctuary from the world.

Derek Jarman was an artist, iconoclastic art house film maker, gay rights activist, writer and gardener, and one of Britain’s most provocative and rebellious creative figures.

His life seemed an exhilarating whirlwind, and his death aged 52 from AIDS in 1994, just two years before the antiretroviral treatments which could have saved him, a tragedy.

But for one night only at the Playhouse theatre in Sheffield, Derek is back. There’s an urgency to his beyond-the-grave pleas that we live to the full, seize each precious moment, have the courage to live bravely – as if this day might be your last.

Perhaps Jarman’s bravest act of all, among the avant-garde films and outre set designs which made his name, was to declare himself, on TV, HIV+ in the late 80s, when it was tantamount to career death to do so. He had been diagnosed just one month earlier.

Mark Farrelly, now London based, but whose parents still live in Stannington to where he was returning after his performance, wrote his powerful solo show after reading Jarman’s journals chronicling the last four years of his life.

The diaries chart those terrible years, against the backdrop of a sociopolitical demonising of homosexuality and HIV, when so many creative lives were snuffed out by an illness which is now so eminently manageable and survivable.

Jarman’s final diary entry came just two weeks before he died, AIDS having robbed him of his sight so that he could see only in shades of blue. The blue light-washed scenes towards the end of the show, as Farrelly portrays Jarman’s nightmarish demise, are uncomfortably heartbreaking to watch.

But there is humour too, gossipy conspiratorial anecdotes, and touching, poignant, compassionate confessions. Farrelly slips effortlessly between accents – Jarman’s father’s New Zealand drawl, Sir John Gielgud’s clipped RP – and whizzes us through the eras in celebration of an audacious life lived without compromise.

There’s even some audience participation, and touching hand-holding to bring to mind a time only Princess Diana held the hands of those dying from the virus, and plenty of laughs, among the anger, sadness and passion, physical performance, music and moving monologue.

Just like the fireworks he describes exploding above Dungeness beach as his life nears its end, Jarman’s life was a kaleidoscope of colour and Mark Farrelly has done a breathtaking job of bringing him back into being so vibrantly.

You leave feeling not just that you’ve seen a stage play but watched a biopic or read a biography, and imagined vividly so many of the scenes within.

Jarman is next performed for a four night run in London next March.