Tim Albery’s show; Garden of Vanished Pleasures, about Derek Jarman and his Kent coast garden was supposed to figure in Soundstreams 2020/21 season and we know what happened to that!  So, it was reengineered as a film and streamed in September of 2021.  I reviewed  it at some length for Opera Canada.  Now director Tim Albery has recreated it as a live show at the Berkeley Street Theatre.

My 2021 review was very much focussed on the piece as a film; as it related to Jarman as a film maker, but it does say everything I have to say about the music, and most of my thoughts about the staging, which I shan’t repeat.  Rather I’m going to look at how it felt different as a live show.  The cast this time includes many of the originals; Mireille Asselin, Daniel Cabena, Brenna Hardy-Kavanagh and Amahl Arulanadam, who are joined by Danika Lorèn, Hilary Tufford and Hyejin Kwon.  Given Daniel’s central role as Jarman or some avatar of Jarman much of the time, the changes didn’t seem particularly consequential.

What changed for me was the increase in the immersive quality of the piece.  It’s a meditative type of experience on film or live but seeing it in 3D in a darkened theatre made it much easier to get lost in the flow (and there’s more “flow” because it’s not presented as a series of “scenes”).  That’s certainly what happened to me on Saturday… to the point where I don’t think I could write the kind of analytical review that I wrote for the film even if I wanted to.

It’s once again visually and sonically very, very beautiful.  The projections work very well in the theatre.  The cast is just as good this time around as before.  The immediacy of live playing and singing brings extra depth.  It’s fundamentally the same show but it gains emotional depth from the sense of community that comes from seeing it performed by real, live people in the company of other real, live people.  All in all, bringing it back was a good idea.

Photo credits: Cylla von Tiedemann