Derek Jarman completed his last feature film Blue in May 1993, some months before he died, aged 52, in February 1994. At the time, AIDS had caused Jarman to lose his sight. Against a constant screen of a International Klein Blue, Jarman and a revolving cast of narrators recall memories and observations from his diaries against a collage of songs, atmospheric sounds, conversation and field recordings of everyday life.

30 years on, Blue Now is a restaging of the project as a series of four live performances across the UK, in Brighton, Margate, Manchester and London, directed by Neil Bartlett and performed by Russell Tovey, Travis Alabanza, Jay Bernard and Joelle Taylor. A digital version of Blue Now will be made available to a global audience via WePresent, the online arts platform of WeTransfer. Jarman’s close associate and longtime collaborator, composer Simon Fisher Turner, produced the ‘Soundmusic’ for Blue Now.

Emily Bick: How does it feel to be revisiting and restaging Blue 30 years on with different artists?

Simon Fisher Turner: Well obviously, it’s fantastic. I like to do it sort of infrequently, anyway, over the years – God, is it 30 years?

Neil [Bartlett] has taken on the mantle of director. And it’s something that I’ve warned him about, because I’m not very good at taking direction. So we haven’t even come to a compromise but it’s all going very smoothly. We’re talking a lot. And that’s the most important thing. Blue’s come along since the original performances. Years ago, even before the film, we were trying to get the money together. Originally, the show was at the Lumiere Cinema, and the Electric Cinema in Portobello, with Tilda [Swinton] and Derek and 40 people on stage. Then we went to other stages, here there and everywhere. We did a live album in Rome, and even last year, we did two concerts in Paris with a completely different line-up each night with different narrators. We did it in French, we did it in English, we had different musicians playing. And now we’ve come down to a new way of doing it again, which is really cool, with these four performers who are really interesting in in their own rights. Obviously we had the script and that’s the main thing. But as for these performers, I think it’s going to be really interesting and really, really emotional. I would think this is going to be one of the most emotionally charged Blues of all time. We’ve only got four performances, and they’ll probably vary. I’m sure they will because they have very strong personalities, as performers, and it’ll be really interesting to see how everybody gets on.

From a sonic point of view, from a musical point of view, there’s much, much, much less music and it’s actually not necessarily music. To me it”s music, but to most people, maybe it’ll just be atmospheres or sounds or something like that. So far, we’re only using one piece of music from the original film, out of 78 cues. We”re trying to quite deliberately avoid the original film. Last year in Paris, we did the Blue concert which used the instrumentation to a certain extent, all the files from [composer] Klara Lewis, and Steve Nieve playing the piano, and then we had French narrators and it was just a different baby altogether.

I would say this is actually probably the first staged production we’ve ever done. Normally they’ve been sort of concerts – this isn’t really so much like a concert. This is more like a performance. It’s almost going to be like a sort of open rehearsal to a certain extent. We will rehearse it a little bit but basically, you know, it”s an improvisation and that’s actually how it’s always been as well, you know? So for me, as a sort of LGBTQ type of variant of what it’s become now, I think it’s going to be amazing. I think Travis and Joelle and Russell are all going to bring – well, it’s going to be really interesting to see how Neil directs. We have structure and then there’s enormous freedom. I’m really looking forward to it.

All these performers have backgrounds in very physical theatre, and poetry, and performance, and have completely different voices. And I’ve read that they’re going to be using some of their own words. It’s not just going to be Derek’s diaries, is that correct?

I’m happy for them to do that. I mean, When we did the live Blue Roma album for Mute years ago in 1995, [John] Quentin, who was one of the narrators, put in some of his poetry which sat perfectly well. That’s the way, you know, it’s free. I mean, I know for instance that the length of it, it’s going to be Blue, and it’s going to be Yves Klein blue, but we’re not playing the film as such. If it goes on for 100 minutes, it goes on for 100 minutes, it’s fairly open-ended. Neil was over here yesterday, and we went through the whole script and the most important thing is, we do have a beginning, and we do have an end. And everything in between, as far as I’m concerned... well, we’re all performing. and so off we go. I mean I can’t wait.

Will you be improvising too? Will there be bits of the score that you’ve composed around this, or are you going to be adding different cues? I’m wondering how that will work, when you’ll have to respond to this in real time.

Yeah. When there’s a piano, I have a piano; I have a Mac, and on the Mac, for the last month or so I’ve started loading up things, which I think are appropriate. and then I get together with Neil, and we go through stuff, we go: yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. The only problem is of course I’m not very technically literate. So I’m not going to be responding immediately to something somebody says. When I’ve gone through the cues, listened to a lot of the cues in the film, they’re incredibly short. So what we’re trying to do on this is to be more like film Foley, but a sort of fake Foley. So we can jog your memory. We’re not necessarily saying ‘oh, this is specifically this’, or ‘this is perfectly that’, but the idea is to set up an atmosphere where we’re underpinning quite unobtrusively most of the time. Then Neil has invented these spaces, just called Simon space, where I can go off on something, but it then has to resolve into something else, which the actors will probably recognise. I’m glad to say that Neil is probably going to be by my side, tapping me on the shoulder and going, ‘Here we go dear, Get ready, off we go. Let’s listen, let’s move on from there and go somewhere else.’

With all of these restagings of Blue, it seems to have really evolved over the years. Even in the film, there’s one section where Derek is talking about the AIDS quilt and the sentimentality of that, how it is like a frozen object. But one of the things about Blue in all of its variations is that it’s very much a living project and it changes as people’s experiences are added to the flow of things. It seems to be more and more inclusive over time. Are there any differences that you’ve seen over the years as Blue has evolved, with people’s experiences and perceptions of both the piece, and experiences with HIV and AIDS?

I would say this is the most widely ranged, of ideas of gender, and I think that this is the sexiest version of all time. I know that people’s experiences will probably be more profound this time than ever before, because basically it’s a gay cast in one way or another. and that’s never happened before. And that’s really fantastic. So I have a feeling there will be tears.

But on the other hand, as I was saying to Neil, it’s not an unhappy piece. You know, it’s actually all about life, and love, and death, and it’s sexy, and it’s funny and it’s not depressing. I don’t think it’s going to be a depressing thing at all. We don’t have doom and gloom music at all, the music is almost peripheral. It just sets the tone, or is the seat underneath. In a way, the music is like a virus itself. It’s always present. But the emphasis really isn’t on the music, the emphasis is on these performers who I think are going to be really, really interesting. And, you know, I think we learn a lot as you do it because it’s not exactly very easy to do.

I think it really is important to get it out there again. I mean, I’ve always believed as a piece of text, as a piece of writing, that it should literally be taught in all schools. In the sixth form, as a piece of literature. I just think it’s a very important thing.

Some things in the film echo and resonate with the present in weird ways. One of the things I found really interesting while revisiting it was the use of field recordings as part of the score, people chatting in cafes and people in the street, plus several mentions of Bosnian refugees from that war.

But with the Bosnian refugees, ever since we’ve done the film, whenever we’ve gone and done a live performance, we just updated the war. That was one of the first things you do to just bring it all up to date. Because we haven’t really moved on at all, have we?

But we won’t make it depressing, we’ll make it a jolly event. It’s great when we talk about, for instance, the end of the film, you know, it can be very moving, and at the moment, Neil and I were talking about how we've got to do something with the end. We're saying, well, do we want people to go home in tears or do we want people to go home thinking about going out to a nightclub? How do we want to leave people? And we can actually do that at the end of this thing, we can actually leave people up or down. It’s very interesting. Neil had this idea that we want to introduce a trancelike atmosphere and really, really get into a vibe. And just nestle in there quietly, take our time to get into it. No hurry, just relax, everybody’s got the script, we’re all nervous and on tenterhooks and we’re going on this journey.

But it’s interesting how little has changed. Funnily enough, it has never occurred to me before, but I’ve been recording bits and bobs in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington for years and years. And of course, that’s where Derek was in hospital. I’d actually, believe it or not, never put two and two together, but coincidences happen. We’re exploring still. They can say it one way, or another way, they can scream it, they can shout it, they can whisper it, they can do whatever. And it’s always going to be fluent and changing. It’s going to be a massive river of Love and Death.

If he was still around today Derek Jarman would be 81. What do you think he would make of this project and how it has evolved?

I’d hope he’d give us his blessing, to carry on, for sure. You know, I think he’d be happy about it. He wasn’t very keen on nostalgia, as far as I know. It’s like, let's let the past fall down, let’s build a new future. But he was a softie at heart, he’d be happy. We have all of this technology now, and who knows, can you imagine the films he’d be making, and would have made? Maybe he would have abandoned film altogether. I mean, maybe he would have gotten into sound, you just don’t know. He could have doubled down on David Lynch and just started making incredible records. Film makers, quite a lot of them seem to be making music these days, because you can just do it. So perhaps he would have written brilliant operas. But I don’t think he’d mind us doing it. Obviously one of the reasons to keep doing it, and this is important – it’s a really good history lesson in every sense. We’ve moved on 30 years but actually not a lot has changed. It’s important to play it for kids now, to all sorts of people now. I think it’s a good idea.

Blue Now will be performed at Margate Turner Contemporary (13 May), Manchester Home (21) and London Tate Modern (27).

Wire subscribers can read Rob Young's 1996 interview with Simon Fisher Turner from The Wire 153 via the online library.