Adrian Jackson (theatre director)
Adrian Antony Jackson is the founder-director and chief executive of the theatre company Cardboard Citizens, who produce work by and for those who have experienced homelessness, including former homeless people, those at risk of homelessness, refugees or asylum-seekers. 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. He was previously Associate Director of London Bubble, a long-established London touring community theatre company, with whom  he directed a number of productions including "Once Upon a Time", "Far Far from England" by Farhana Sheikh, "Measure for Measure" by William Shakespeare and "Too Much Too Young" by Catherine Johnson, as well as a number of Forum Theatre projects with communities including Irish Travellers, Deaf people, and adults with learning difficulties. Through Cardboard Citizens, he has collaborated with a number of other organisations, including the Royal Shakespeare Company ("Pericles"), English National Opera ("The Beggar's Opera"), London Bubble ("The Lower Depths"), and Formaat Theatre in Rotterdam ("Home and Away"). Outside of Cardboard Citizens, Adrian Jackson is a well -travelled teacher and translator. He has worked as Augusto Boal’s translator on four books – most recently the "Aesthetics of the Oppressed –" and has collaborated with him on many occasions; apart from workshops, they also worked together on The Art of Legislation, an Artangel-sponsored piece of Legislative Theatre at County Hall in London. He has led training in the Theatre of the Oppressed methodology in many contexts - throughout Europe, as well as in Asia, Africa and Latin America. 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, 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 Lemn Sissay, ‘I just wanted to share the vastness  of this beautiful piece of work with people’ He is currently working on his own book, provisionally entitled "The Art of the Joker". In December 2017 he was awarded an MBE for Services to the Arts in the 2018 New Year Honours List. Stage productions. as co director