Is Derek Jarman the first director to be more famous for his foliage than his films? At Prospect Cottage, his black-and-yellow sanctuary squatting in the shadow of the nuclear power station at Dungeness on the Kent coast, Jarman nurtured a garden in the inauspicious shingle; plants thrived between the jagged upturned stones he likened to dragon’s teeth. Thanks to his writings – notably the diaries published as Modern Nature in 1991, three years before his death – and the 2020 crowdfunding campaign to preserve the dwelling for the nation, the cottage and its gardens are now familiar and accessible to people who have never seen Sebastiane or Edward II, and may never want to.
Film is the flickering backdrop to the Barbican’s evening of music and readings celebrating Modern Nature, rather than its focal point, though Super 8 footage of a youthful Tilda Swinton (Jarman’s muse) provides a neat counterpoint to the pre-recorded sound of her 21st-century voice. Here in person are performers including the musician Simon Fisher Turner – a Jarman collaborator – along with Jessie Buckley, Shaun Evans and Will Young as well as It’s a Sin co-stars Olly Alexander and Omari Douglas.
Each one reads from the journals, their distinct tones suggesting different aspects of Jarman – like the six contrasting Bob Dylans in Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There. Buckley is piercing, Evans booming, Young cosily avuncular, Alexander coquettish and Douglas wry and rueful. If so low-key an evening could be said to have a scene-stealer, it is the countertenor Nils Wanderer, who blasts in like a gale – appropriately so, given the emphasis on the meteorological.
As directed by James Dacre, the readings dwell on the tempests in Jarman’s life: his battles with a failing body (he bought Prospect Cottage in 1986, the year of his HIV diagnosis) and with the state-sanctioned homophobia of Section 28. As the weather at Dungeness worsens, it can all seem like a cold front of symbolism complete with gusts of metaphor. But there is vitality here, too, in this place that the film-maker called the sunniest in all of England, as well as waves of catalysing anger and defiance which will come in handy now that LGBTQ+ people face levels of hostility not seen since Jarman’s day.
