Full admission: I first saw Will Adamsdale, the man behind Jackson’s Way in Edinburgh this past summer. He talked to me for a little while in Pleasance Courtyard while I was waiting for a show to start. He gave me a free ticket, told me that he’d gotten his performance slot at the last minute, but that he was building his reputation and it would be a big hit next summer. Right, I thought, took the ticket and proceeded to forget about his show. At the end of the festival, when the Perrier award for best comedy was announced, I thought “Who’s Jackson’s Way?” I looked at the poster and thought—no way! Yes, way: Jackson’s Way. I wasn’t going to miss it this time around, with only one performance night in Oxford.

So what is Jackson’s Way? A tricky question. You have to start with what it is not: it has no point. In fact, with a big diagram of a dot on stage, Jackson explains, the ‘base-camp’ idea—the starting-point—of Jackson’s way is that it is everything but the dot. It extends beyond the paper and into the audience. Seinfeld was an American TV show about ‘nothing’; no plot. Jackson’s way is not about nothing—it’s about everything next to, discarded by, and opposite of something. It has no point, but it is not nothing either. It is just irrelevant.
Now that may sound obscure, but this show is not about leaving you comfortable. This is one of the shows where most people who leave are going to look uncomfortably at each other after, smiling, knowing that they spent a lot of time laughing—but not sure whether the joke has been on them. Was this a show that was purely taking the piss out of the audience?

The things that happen in the show: Jackson kicks a cloth. Then he asks an audience member to throw it on stage. Does this have a point, he asks? No. He picks up a bottle of water. And then he tries to pick up the same bottle, a half-metre beside the bottle, and of course misses the bottle. Is it possible? No, he says, it’s not possible. He climbs the wall and tries to escape gravity. Not possible, he says. He gathers junk from random cities, trash, place-mats with pigs, pieces of wood, tattered rugs. These things have no point. They are things we normally pay no attention: we discard them, we forget about them, we can’t see them.

Jackson is an American motivational speaker, of sorts, trying to get the audience to buy into his way. For brief little moments, he lets us believe that he is almost psychotic and crazy, and that this explains our incomprehension. He was a businessman, about to go into a meeting, but then one day just stopped, and started staring at the ‘business park’, the parking-lot, the trees, the shrubs, etc. for four days. And that his when he discovered the way. (This is when the irrelevant became relevant). Did he go insane? It’s hard to say.

But mostly, Jackson is just eager: to please, to convince, and to be understood, mimicking characters in stories with no purpose and engaging the audience for no reason. The few times Jackson leaves character are when his audience member volunteers try to do something: if he did something along with them, his show would lose its non-meaning, so he has to ridicule them until they stop. The show, plods along uncomfortably at first, hits a fast climax with music, as the audience picks up on what he’s (not) doing, and somehow, arbitrarily picks a point to end, when there is so much more irrelevance that he’s missed. He is both totally in control and embarrassingly awkward.

The show dares us to find any meaning it. Eschewing the Western tradition, without explicitly mentioning it, he evokes Eastern attempts to focus on what is around things, rather than on the things themselves. He evokes the existential tradition: if there is no meaning, then surely it doesn’t matter what we make our show about: focusing on what is irrelevant is just as good as anything else. His show evokes tragedy—what could be more tragic than watching a man so desperately trying to sell something that is nothing? It is absolutely absurd. But he says, rightly, “you’re having a good time, aren’t you? But some of you may try to say: hey, we’re having a good time, there’s a point to that.” He pauses briefly: “No, because what if I put an ‘r’ right in front of the ‘o’. Then there would be no pRoint.” That’s the Jackson Way.

Oliver Morrison, 18/02/2005