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Blue Now

Tramway, Glasgow

Four stars

 

Sound and Vision are the heart of director Neil Bartlett’s theatrical reimagining of Derek Jarman’s final film, completed four months before his death from an AIDS related illness in 1994. Featuring an Yves Klein hued blue screen for the film’s full 74-minute duration, Blue features a collage of voices speaking excerpts from Jarman’s diary as he gradually lost his sight. 

 

As Jarman ruminated on friends and lovers lost to what had been demonised as ‘the gay plague’, this opened up a bigger picture of a world that had been decimated. This was offset across several sections by a more impressionistic narrative.

 

Thirty years on, Bartlett brings a new quartet of voices to recount what has now become a (self) portrait of a major moment in late twentieth century social and political history. More than that, as the cast of Travis Alabanza, Joelle Taylor, Jay Bernard and Russell Tovey line up on stools beneath the screen, it becomes a rhapsody to a time and a place, and an elegy to the film’s creator. 

 

To the quartet’s right, the film’s original composer Simon Fisher Turner sits at a piano, with Bartlett beside him at a laptop. To their left, composer and cellist Lucy Railton scratches out delicate musical fragments that enhance the ambient pulse of Turner’s score. Next to Railton, BSL Interpreter Karen Forbes brings a wordless physicality to what amounts to a voice-based symphonic collage that is by turns moving, angry and at times loaded with black - and blue - humour. 

 

This Glasgow show follows dates in England after being commissioned by the WePresent by WeTransfer organisation in association with Basilisk Communications and original producers, Fuel. Presented here by James Mackay, it coincides with the opening of Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, a major new exhibition at Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery. Seen in tandem, this exquisite leap into the void brings Jarman’s artistry to life in a masterpiece of sight and sound. 


The Herald, November 4th 2024

 

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