Adrian Jackson (theatre director)

Here for Life is a feature film marking the culmination of a long collaboration between film-maker Andrea Luka Zimmerman and theatre-maker Adrian Jackson, a group of Londoners, and a dog. It was previewed outdoors 11–20 June 2019 at Nomadic Community Gardens where much of the footage was shot; it was awarded a Special Mention from the Concorso Cineasti del presente jury during its premiere at the Locarno Film festival, Switzerland 15 August 2019, and prior to its UK and Ireland general release, 22 November 2019, was shortlisted for the Raindance Discovery Award at the annual British Independent Film Awards (BIFA). The film has since won first prize in the category for International Feature Film at Palmarès Festival de cinéma En ville 2020.

Jackson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2018 New Year Honours for his service in the arts.

In 2017, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts elected Jackson as a companion in their teaching programme.

Cathy was directed by Adrian Jackson, designed by Lucy Sierra, with lighting design by Mark Dymock and sound by Matt Lewis. On its 2016 tour, Cathy was seen by more than 2,200 people, 170 of whom saw it in a hostel. In theatres, the hugely successful £1 ticket initiative has offered vulnerable and homeless people an accessible way to experience this powerful and emotive Forum Theatre piece; almost 20% of tickets have been sold at this price.

In 2014, Jackson won an Artangel Open Award, in collaboration with Andrea Luka Zimmerman. Their project was inspired by Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves, and encourages London's diverse communities to tell their own stories through performance and film, resulting in the 2019 feature film Here For Life. Kieron Corless, from Sight & Sound, called it ‘A film of great compassion and political and aesthetic ambition, in which the idea of a collective is prioritized for a change, but without sacrificing or downplaying the individual voices and idiosyncrasies that it comprises’. The film was widely and warmly received and notably moved in its reception beyond filmgoing audiences, as evidenced in the response from the poet and writer Lemn Sissay, ‘I just wanted to share the vastness of this beautiful piece of work with people.’

Jackson has worked with many theatre forms, including classics, musicals and an opera; one of his specialisms has been the Theatre of the Oppressed, having translated five books by the Brazilian theatre pioneer Augusto Boal, with whom he collaborated on an annual basis till his death in 2009.

In 2003, The Royal Shakespeare Company started collaborating with Cardboard Citizens, the UK’s only homeless people’s professional theatre company, to present Shakespeare’s Pericles, in a warehouse off the Old Kent Road in London. Earlier that year, a rapidly rehearsed cut-down version of Pericles was performed to audiences of asylum seekers and refugees in various unusual venues across the capital. The audience included Iraqis, Kosovo Albanians, Kurds, Turks, Colombians, Iranians and people from various African countries. After the hour long show, the audience members told their stories. The aim of the new production was to interweave some of these stories and others within a fuller version of Shakespeare’s Pericles.

Mincemeat was first performed in 2001. This production was the first theatrical play based on real events in which an ordinary person affects a bigger sweep in history.

Jackson founded Cardboard Citizens in 1991, based around the principles of Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed model. The company tours theatre productions, especially interactive Forum Theatre, to venues including hostels, day centres, schools and theatres. As described by Cardboard Citizen Ambassador, Kate Winslet:

Jackson was born in Oxford, England. He attended Lord Williams's School, a comprehensive school in Thame, Oxon, and later Magdalen College Oxford from 1976 to 1979, where he studied English, graduating with a BA Honors Degree.

Jackson first bought a book by Augusto Boal in 1976. He found The Theatre of the Oppressed ‘exciting but difficult to read,’ and skipped to the end to scan the few practical exercises offered almost as a postscript. In the late 1980s he encountered the work again, in workshops with Boal himself, and ended up inviting him to London to deliver a workshop at London Bubble, where he was working as Associate Director.

Described as ‘a swirl of stories connecting different places and times, and slipping between fact and fiction.’ A Few Man Fridays unearths an inglorious episode of British history. Between 1967 and 1973, the population of the Chagos Islands was evicted to make way for a US military base. For forty years they have fought for justice in an epic struggle that is unlikely to end even when the European Court of Justice delivers a ruling later this year. A Few Man Fridays traces the displacement of these 'unpeople' and the successive denial of their right to nationhood.

First broadcast in 1966 on the BBC, Cathy Come Home depicts a young family’s slide into homelessness. The first screening of the film led to public outrage at the state of housing in Britain and became a defining cultural landmark, demonstrating the power of art to effect social and political change.

Adrian Antony Jackson MBE (born 23 September 1956) is an English theatre director, playwright, teacher and trainer.

The play is based on the extraordinary true story of a second-world-war deception, through which the Allies made the Germans believe that they would open a second front in Europe in 1943 through Sardinia. The deception involved a corpse whose identity was a state secret, known only to the originator of the operation, who took the secret to his grave. It was only in 1997 that the true identity of the corpse came to light.