Kim Noble Will Die is a visceral trip through the supposedly diseased mind of the performer. The show defies both expectation and description with its mix of comedy, physical theatre, projected images, animation and filmed pranks performed with twisted glee, as well as large amounts of seminal fluid.

The performance begins with Kim Noble greeting the entering audience wearing a comedy bald head, thick white facial make-up, a Superman outfit left hanging at his waist and a tuxedo jacket. He hands out medical specimen jars to a few of those taking their seats, while inviting one audience member onstage to wear a bucket on his head for the rest of the show.

An introduction, of sorts, is made by the performer’s mother whose face is projected onto the bucket being worn by the unlucky ticket-buyer. The concerned parent explains her son was almost a success but that mental illness has taken its toll and, while contemporaries such as comedian Catherine Tait have gone onto better things, he has languished. “Am I bothered? Yes I am fucking bothered”, she spits. Another projection, this time of the performer’s face, is beamed onto a doll sitting on a seat centre stage. Throughout the performance Kim Noble, with spot-on timing, has conversations with these ‘talking heads’, making what must be a logistical nightmare look completely natural.

There then follows a breathtaking descent into all that has gone wrong with the performer’s life, with no hint as to what might be fact and what might be fiction. Is that really a recording of a telephone conversation with his former girlfriend who dumped him for his producer? Is he genuinely self-harming on video? Did that girl actually urinate on his face as he lay in the middle of a road? Has he honestly been reduced to eating dog food? A ‘claymation’ video, both horrific and oddly amusing, shows the animated Kim Noble blowing his brains out with a shotgun. He says that he is currently planning his actual suicide.

The performer resorts to books by hypnotist and self-help guru Paul McKenna, who he starts a one-sided e-mail correspondence with. He seems to find some meaning in the phrase “live every moment as if it was your last”, taking this motto and setting out to save strangers from wasting their time on cultural detritus. He makes ingenious DVDs of movies such as ‘The March of the Penguins’ and ‘Ghandi’ with his own animated versions clocking in at well under a minute. Placing the doctored DVDs onto the shelves of High Street retailers, a process illustrated with short films, he urges the buyers to use the time saved to go and do something worthwhile with their lives. He follows this up with a similar scheme involving books, cutting out a page and replacing it with his two-line precis. The put-downs delivered to the authors of these books, mainly television celebrities, are hilariously withering.

A satire of reality television ends with a confused audience member being ‘evicted’ from the theatre – her only crime being unfortunate enough to receive the lowest number of cheers.

The show is dazzling, with ideas at every turn. Regularly shifting from nauseating imagery to belly laughs in seconds, it creates a macabre and uncomfortable atmosphere where the audience become almost as much a part of the show as the performer.

Kim Noble, or the character he plays, is the stereotypical sad clown but the tragedy conveyed throughout is tempered with the oddly uplifting scenes of cultural vandalism. This comes to a head when a rendition of ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ by the band ‘Guns ‘n’ Roses’ is accompanied by videos showing Kim Noble exacting perverse revenge on all he feels have slighted him using his own bodily fluids. As the film plays in the background he cradles a ventriloquist dummy while intimately touching himself.

A premature end arrives with him telling everybody in the audience, other than those who have been given medical specimen jars, to fuck off. There is a shout of disgust from what may be a stooge in the audience, struggling with security and screaming: “Kim Noble, you’re a cunt”. The rest of the crowd, who perhaps deserve a performer’s credit themselves, stagger out bewildered and bemused, only able to guess at the true conclusion seen by the lucky few.

A phenomenal and dizzying piece of theatre, it must just be hoped that Kim Noble doesn’t now carry out his disturbing promise to take his own life – in this show there’s simply no way to tell what is true and what is invented.

Cast Credits: (alpha order): Kim Noble.

Company Credits: Kim Noble. Directors: Kim Noble and Gary Reich. Company – Brown Eyed Boy.

END

(c) David Hepburn 2009

reviewed Thursday 27 August 09 / Assembly Rooms @ George Street, Edinburgh, UK

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012

www.fringereport.com