Body 115 by Jan Noble. The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, Brockley Road, London SE4 to 11 May 2024.

4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“A tsunami of words dazzlingly delivered.”

The poet Jan Noble has performed this poem inspired by the number given to the unidentified body in the 1987 fire in the King’s Cross Underground at the Camden Fringe and the Hope Theatre in Islington before and no brings it south of the river. He is not an actor but he is a performer and delivers this tsunami of words with great power as we follow him from the fire and its victim all over Europe and through time – Marlowe and Keats are encountered along the way, we go to the refugee camp in Calais, to the surroundings of King’s Cross and the sewers below, to Paris and to the glories of Milan where it rains. Indeed rain features throughout. It is one of these evenings when you sit back and let the words engulf you while, with some well chosen sound effects and really effective lighting, Noble, engulfed in a great coat with only a suitcase flat on the ground as a prop storms around the stage. People real and mythic, some long dead, are met along the way – a bit like James Joyce perhaps in Ulysses. Noble insists he is not an actor, bu he is undeniably an outstanding performer and director Justin Butcher has seen to that he delivers his story of a man unlucky in love on a trip through time in search of some explanation for all that has happened to him in an amazing fashion.

Cast

Jan Noble

Creatives

Director - Justin Butcher.

Sound Design – Jack Arnold.

Lighting Design – Tom Turner.