What a glorious mess. Derek Jarman’s film fantasia of a punk apocalypse in Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee year of 1977 was cheap, at once titillating and provocative, and far more enthusiastic than it was informed about its nominal subject. Nevertheless, it provided Jarman’s first sizeable sensation as a commentator on social and sexual identity. Forty years on (-ish: the film actually came out in early ’78), Chris Goode has remade it as the stage piece it “always, secretly, seemed to me to be”.

This is one of several illuminating comments in Goode’s programme notes. He also says “I sometimes think everything I think I know about theatre I learned first from [Jarman]”, and Goode’s work likewise mixes thought with fervour, precision with the deliberate leaving of space in which material can evolve or blink spontaneously into being. Much of the latter element in this production centres around Travis Alabanza, who plays Amyl Nitrate, the twinsetted figure who stands as the intellectual powerhouse behind the nihilistic girl gang at the centre of events. Alabanza principally performs direct to the audience; some of their material (they prefer gender-non-specific pronouns) is effectively cabaret, some electrifying polemic.

Goode and his company have not reproduced the Seventies version, nor simply updated its references... although there’s a lot of that, and cleverly double-edged: John Lydon crops up twice in the show, once when Public Image Ltd’s “Death Disco” blares briefly on the soundtrack, and later as the implicit subject of a one-liner about appearing in butter commercials. In the film, pyromaniac Mad was played by a young Toyah Willcox in one of her first screen appearances; here, Willcox appears as Queen Elizabeth I, witnessing these events in a mystical vision. But what has principally been shot into 2017 is the transgressive, challenging spirit. Emphasising women rather than men and homo- over hetero- was enough for early Jarman: here, all vectors of gender-queer mosh together. The perils of capitalism, oddly, don’t seem to have needed much updating.

Sometimes it’s crass, sometimes overextended and tedious (and pretty much always, as Jarman succinctly called it, “rude”). But for every facepalm moment such as the dispiritingly safe collective howlalong of Toyah’s greatest hit “I Want To Be Free” there is an unexpectedly thrilling one like Alabanza’s riff on the “no future” motif... and all stations between. Its successes and failures alike are magnificently theatrical. A glorious mess.

Written for the Financial Times.