Sex and the shingle man

Jarman Garden at Riverside Studios is a walk through the life and times of the great director

Exactly a decade after Derek Jarman's death, his famous beach garden at Prospect Cottage, in Dungeness, Kent, has been recreated for Jarman Garden, a performance piece by Flaming Theatre. Jarman established the garden in the shadow of a nuclear power station after learning that he had HIV, and Ben Gove, who conceived the show and co-directs it with Cass Fleming, has tried to maintain the contrasts present in the original. "The mixture of the bleakness of the landscape with this incredible sculptural garden that he created, against all odds, was the starting-point," he explains. "We thought this was an interesting way of exploring his life and his work."

Jarman Garden is a fantasia on the career of the artist, film-maker (his films included Caravaggio, Edward II and Sebastiane), gay activist and gardener. The audience sits scattered around a dream-like version of the garden. Through snapshots of important moments in Jarman's life, extracts from his journals about living with Aids, and scenes from his films, the show, at Riverside Studios, west London, aims to create a sensory collage of his life.

Gove is in the midst of intense rehearsals, working closely with a cast of six as the piece comes together through improvisation. "We are trying to make it a sensory experience, so there is a strong sense of [the audience] being involved, and hopefully overwhelmed, rather than it being purely intellectual," he says. "It is very alive."

The work explores Jarman's development as an artist and the growth in his confidence about his sexuality. "What is so fascinating about his life is that it mirrors the growth of gay culture and the era of sexual liberation in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties," Gove says. "We are also inspired by the techniques he used - strong theatricality and a clash of images and sounds - and the way he mixed media."

The stage, at first wooden boards, eventually reveals earth and shingles. The actors move sculptures into the spaces, while Jarman's film The Garden is projected as a landscape along with other images including flowers from Dungeness, footage of Soho life and a short erotic-dream sequence. "With the actors threading through it all, it is a bit like a maze," says Gove; "the past and present keep getting mixed up."

The designer is Erik Rehl, of the dance company Q. Thomas Power, James Hyland and Nicholas Chambers take turns at playing Jarman.

Riverside Studios is showing a run of Jarman's films that ends on Friday and a previously unexhibited portrait by Michael Clarke, whose other painting of Jarman hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

But Gove is concerned that Jarman Garden should not be a museum piece. "We don't want a greatest-hits package," he says. "We wanted it also to include images that have come out of our original work."

'Jarman Garden', Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London W6 (020-8237 1111) tomorrow to 6 March