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Evening Standard Arts In Association With
Review at a glance
“Welcome to Jubilee. An iconic film most of you have never even heard of, adapted by an Oxbridge tw*t for a dying medium, spoiled by millennials, ruined by diversity, and constantly threatening to go all interactive. You poor f**kers”. As these lines from near the start illustrate, Jubilee is not a genteel evening. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but a hard-going evening is far harder to forgive.
Director Chris Goode has adapted Derek Jarman’s cult 1978 punk film — the jubilee in question is the Queen’s silver — for the 21st century and the result is a ferocious outburst of unremitting nihilistic anger.
It’s set among the young and disaffected inhabitants of a squat; there’s nudity, many bare breasts and some incest for good measure. Strange scenes featuring Queen Elizabeth I (Toyah Willcox, pictured,one of the stars of the original film) bookend the action.
There’s a series of fragmentary, centrifugal scenes of rage and violence, intertwined with scathing commentary on our throwaway celebrity culture. The whole cast goes at this with unfettered energy; Travis Alabanza gives a blazing performance as ringleader and Rose Wardlaw has real charisma as the sexually voracious but lonely Crabs. But I just couldn’t shake the question: why?
Until March 10