Considering the everybloke nature of many of the UK’s more popular comedians, the last several years of the Edinburgh Festival comedy prize have yielded some startlingly fey victors. Tim Key and Laura Solon spring immediately to mind, but step back a little further and you’ll stumble across Will Adamsdale, whose performance piece ‘Jackson’s Way’ – a vehicle for his spoof motivational speaker Chris John Jackson – scooped the 2004 Perrier Award.
It’s now been revived for a 26-date, 26-venue tour of London, and one of the most pleasing things about this undertaking is that its sheer impracticality (I saw it in a chilly, echoey Shunt. A later date is underneath the Westway; in all honesty, I’d advise you to see it some place warm) is in itself an object lesson in Jackson’s Way, a mock philosophy which states that people limit themselves by doing things that make sense, and that to realise our full potential, we should do things that make no sense whatsoever.
The beauty of Adamsdale’s superbly realised piece is that it manages to have it both ways in its deployment of absurdity: it skewers the self-justifying vapidity of the culture of positive thinking, yet it also celebrates the simple joy of doing silly things for no good reason.
Post bank bailouts etc, the show’s treatment of corporate bullshit perhaps seems overly indulgent. But it remains strong because at heart it’s not a politicised work; it’s a funny, joyful one powered by Adamsdale’s heroically committed performance as Jackson, a sad little man who has nothing left but self-belief, leading us through a meaninglessly Byzantine series of exercises with irresistible zeal.