Back in the early 1980s
I went out of my way to see Jubilee,
Derek Jarman’s homage to the punk ethos, purely because it starred Toyah
Willcox whom I was devoted to as a teenager. Now in middle age, like Toyah herself, I return to the piece courtesy of
the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester who are honouring the 40th
anniversary of the landmark movie.
The original celluloid extravaganza has
all the hallmarks of Jarman’s work. Bold
characters, a fairytale approach to the visuals and oodles of nudity, profanity
and violence. Classic Jarman. Jarman always felt to me like a poet trying to find
a way of telling his story in an unfamiliar medium and he was prone to be self-indulgent
with his work and this stage re-working of Jubilee
picks up all the brilliance and all the flaws associated with him as a
storyteller. We are told at the beginning of the piece that audiences from a
subsidised theatre are better quality therefore putting us in our place from
the get go. The play is described on
stage as “an iconic film most of you have never heard of, adapted by an
Oxbridge twat for a dying medium, spoiled by millennials, ruined by diversity,
and constantly threatening to go interactive”.
It’s a brilliant summary and cannot be challenged. The designer Chloe Lamford has made good use
of the Exchange’s multi levels, managing
to create a jaded world of squats and all encompassing degradation with which to play out the sequence of events.
Central to the entire
evening is performance artist Travis Alabanza who parades around as the conscience
of the piece Amyl Nitrate. Addressing the audience direct clad in a series of
snazzy outfits, she champions the
underdog whilst seemingly there to referee the pot pourri of misfits that
inhabit the world of Jubilee. Alabanza manages to make Amyl's presence the single most indelible memory of the play. Pyromaniac Mad Medussa is expertly handled by
Temi Wilkey, clad with red hair, jump suits and a
lighter she is itching to use on something,
Wilkey makes Mad a firestarter worthy of having her creator look down
on her nightly from the balcony. Sphinx (Craig Hamilton) and Angel (Tom
Ross-Williams) are brothers with a nice line in incest and spend a large
proportion of the play cavorting totally naked. Deaf actress Sophie Stone makes
Bod an outsider, seemingly shunted to
the sidelines which fuels the anger within.
And what anger it turns out to be. Harold Finley delivers multiple
joys, first as John Dee, the Virgin Queen’s astronomer. Then we have
the ruthless media mogul Borgia Ginz not to mention a terrified café waitress. Yandass
Ndlovu as Kid, an up and coming musician and dancer (played in the movie by
Adam Ant) displays a charisma worthy of the part, whilst Lucy Ellison flits about as Ariel, the
sprite from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, not to mention sultry performance artist Viv. Sex enthusiast Crabs (Rose Wardlaw), who
is not averse to suffocating her lovers, completes the gang of misfits whilst Gareth
Kieran Jones proves worthy of his multiple supporting roles.
During the course of
the evening Toyah Willcox presides over the desolate 2017 landscape before her
from above with shock, revulsion, bewilderment and
finally succumbs with a rendition of her 1981 hit “I Want To Be Free”. It is a
glorious ending. She was Mad, she is Mad.
In fact the entire piece is mad. It is a
pretty uneven affair though. The first
act feels as though it could do with some trimming and Jordan’s iconic
performance of “Rule Britannia” in the 1978 movie is a pivotal moment yet it
seems to fall oddly flat in the theatre. However, the piece suddenly roars to
life at the start of the second act with a group dance to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls”
which gives the energy the piece needs a kick start. In fact the entire evening feels like a
musical that hasn’t been given full flight. Director Chris Goode has deliberately
set out to shock and tease throughout,
but as if heeding his absent master Jarman, some of the imagery and
desire to burn itself into your retina has come at the cost of pacing and
through narrative. We laugh and gawp at the characters like monkeys in a zoo, but a lack of depth to any of
them suspends our ability to have any empathy. They are just there, and we have
to accept it.
Whatever the pitfalls
of presenting Jarman on stage, this is a
full on evening which pushes away the boundaries of conventional theatre. Quite a few didn’t return after the interval (“fuck
‘em” spits Amyl) but they deprived themselves of a much more engaging second round. The production is so nearly there in terms of
creating something that is unique and pioneering, it just needs that little extra bit of sculpting to
go from exceptional to brilliance.
