Creator: Jennifer Jackson Company
Jenni Jackson is the Under 50kg British Judo Champion. She tells us this many times throughout her 90-minute show, which is part Judo demonstration and part cathartic therapy. She needs to fix something from her past. Fortunately, she now has plenty of friends to help her.
When she was a young girl, she witnessed her Bolivian mother being racially abused while waiting in a queue for a cashier in the Nuneaton branch of C&A. Jackson was only little so could do nothing. But no one else did anything either. It’s a memory that now haunts the adult Jackson.
In many ways, WRESTLELADSWRESTLE is similar to Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz which provocatively recreates the time when Alabanza was assaulted on Waterloo Bridge when a man threw a burger at them. Even though they saw the transphobic attack, none of the passersby intervened. In the play, Alabanza cooks up a similar burger in the theatre.
However, in her show, Jackson appears to blame herself for not doing anything to protect her mother. She imagines scenarios in which she speaks up against the man who shouts racist slurs in an argument – so British – about queue jumping. In another scene, Jackson pretends that she is some kind of superhero in which she gets the better of the attacker.
Presumably, the desire to have done more is behind Jackson’s decision to take up Judo, and most of the throws she demonstrates on a series of mats are techniques to foil an attack. Poor Simon Carroll Jones, her assistant, must be thrown on the ground again and again.
Of course, the many repetitions in WRESTLELADSWRESTLE serve as testimony to the countless hours Jackson has spent training, learning to fall over safely, and practising how to hold down an opponent for 20 seconds. But they also represent the trappings of memory and guilt as she attempts to move on from the life-changing incident. She is caught within Freud’s repetition compulsion, unable to forget, constantly reliving the moment and wondering “What if?”
This may sound as if the show is a sad one, but there is plenty of joy here, too, especially when other female judokas join her on stage and Isobel Odelola fervently plays the drums. At one point, during wild celebration, it seems as if the show is about to end, but Jackson cleverly adds a few more scenes to create a conclusion that is quiet and bittersweet. The “what ifs” are transformed into “what nows”.
Runs until 8 March 2025
