As annoying as it is writing about a show that’s just finished, KIM NOBLE WILL DIE is undoubtedly the most intense and arresting ‘comedy’ show I have ever seen. I caught the last date of a five week run at the Soho Theatre, aware that the show involved suicide, self-mutilation and masturbation and that it was widely hailed as the best comedy performance of 2009; Time Out called it ‘a profound work of art’.
The audience-performer dynamic in comedy has always been perverse. You go for a laugh on a night out, but it’s usually pretty tense in the only environment where the performer has license to turn on the audience and vice-versa. This stress was obviated in Noble’s show by the constantly unnerving atmosphere of the event. He stood at the door as people came in, wearing not one but two plastic bald caps, face painted white, a body-hugging Superman outfit stripped to his waist and his marathon finisher’s medal around his neck.
He wandered up to members of the audience and whispered to them, handing them beakers taken out of a fridge onstage. He even led a member of the audience up before the show began, put a bucket on his head onto which a video of Noble’s mother was projected throughout, sitting below him a doll with the face of a man with a moustache projected onto it. It felt like David Lynch directing an episode of Chris Morris’s JAM, only live.
Noble won the Perrier Best Newcomer award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2000 for his show with Stuart Silver, and has performed with The Mighty Boosh amongst others: Rich ‘Bob Fossil’ Fulcher and Julian Barratt were in attendance, as was Julia Davis. The show centred around Noble’s death wish, springing from the disillusionment of not achieving the giddy heights that his erstwhile on-set runner Matthew Horne and former early days co-star Catherine Tate have achieved, and the usual insecurities besetting his life and (lack of) loves.
Well, so far, so average you might think. But it was the brilliantly crafted performance coordinating video and surgically deployed set-pieces that made it riveting. He showed a video of a scenario in which he is run over repeatedly until he is in pieces on the road, Noble’s dismembered body vomiting blood as he explains that he would probably not die so honourably but have to endure one last humiliation: like being urinated on by a passing woman, he explains. Then a woman crouches over him, the camera cuts away and you think you’ve been saved, only to go back to him being pissed on. Noble’s skill is in drawing a line, showing it to you, and then crossing it.
So he gave the audience fivers, took one off someone and shredded it, showed a musical he had directed where he sings about finding the right type of meat in a supermarket, intercut with him slashing his arms with razor blades. Later he played a recorded phone call he made to the brother of the girl he self-harmed with after she had killed herself.
He brings his private life uncomfortably close, the elopement of his girlfriend with his producer, encouraging us to bombard them with texts, before imploring one woman in the front row to text a girl he met the other night to see if she will go on a date with him. He explains how falling in love stopped him from throwing himself off Waterloo bridge as he had advertised in May last year, and then plays us the call he made to this girlfriend after she had miscarried their child. Uncomfortable doesn’t quite cover it. His material and execution reaches beyond uncomfortable to another place which burnt my mind with its imagery and left an unsettling emotional residue for hours afterwards and throughout the next day.
It’s not all pitch-black though, there are many lighter moments which are consistently funny: his lambasting of Paul Mckenna, doctoring of a MARCH OF THE PENGUINS DVD and audio greeting cards, and even Des Lynam’s autobiography. This supermarket-swap of real goods for customised ones is nothing new, Banksy even pulled that stunt on Paris Hilton’s foray into music.
But then there is a sequence where it’s revealed that the beakers in the fridge contain Noble’s semen, through several unbelievably explicit videos of him ejaculating into them, microwaveable ready meals, a tube of Vagisil and a tube of KY Jelly before replacing them on the shelves.
Will he kill himself? (perhaps there was a risk he would this being the last show, but I wouldn’t have bet on it)Is it for real? Does it matter? The extent to which this is a performance or the ‘real’ Kim Noble matters about as much as whether this is ‘comedy’ or somehow more serious ‘theatre’. The strength of the emotions it provokes is what really matters. The audience was sent out before we could even applaud. Applause seemed unnecessary; an insult even. It wasn’t the freezing temperatures that left me shaking as I left the theatre.
