A mesmeric reckoning with the devastation of Aids, Blue Now is an ode to an extraordinary artist and his lost generation. Created in 1993, completed just a few months before his death, Blue was Derek Jarman’s final feature film. Originally voiced by his long-term collaborators and featuring nothing but a wide expanse of International Klein Blue, the film is a searing collection of diary excerpts from a period when Aids took his friends, his sight – he began to be able to see only in blue – and when he knew it would soon take his life.
In four performances across four cities, the script is today given new, vivid life by Russell Tovey, Joelle Taylor, Travis Alabanza and Jay Bernard. These prominent queer voices from across the worlds of theatre and poetry sit in front of a large blue screen, perfectly still in the near-darkness, a heady, tragic lullaby on their lips. Where Jarman’s original was a rejection of the visual, Neil Bartlett’s new presentation gives us a little more to look at. The light gently bounces off the faces of the performers and original composer Simon Fisher Turner, and Jarman’s words turn into a fluid, lyrical dance in the hands of BSL interpreter Ali Gordon.
In its stillness and quiet intensity, this is not always an easy experience. Some of the language is labyrinthine, focus can shift and scuttle away, and I sometimes have to remind myself to look at the blue rather than seek out the features of the faces underneath. But the rhythm is enrapturing, the words of fury and frankness lapping over the sound of waves and gravel crunching on Jarman’s beloved Dungeness beach.
Fisher Turner’s score, almost entirely new, is made of xylophonic shimmers, metallic scrapes and industrial thrummings, at times sounding like a roaring plane is about to take off. The sound doesn’t orchestrate the words so much as outline the feeling of them: a nauseating grinding churns under a long, gruelling list of the side effects of a drug Jarman’s been offered. It makes the room ache.
By extending his words to a younger generation and treating the work with a sense of reverence, this new presentation seems to address, and hope to counter, Jarman’s fear of his generation being forgotten. Mournful, mundane and unsentimental, Blue Now is a remarkable gathering of – and memorial for – queer voices, old and new.
