Kim Noble Will Die - Fringe 2009
Live Review

This is, hands down, the most intense and disturbing comedy performance at the Fringe. Raw, deeply personal, genuinely troubling – it could be the best, bravest show here, or the worst pile of reprehensible indulgence. I genuinely don’t know – that’s why it’s impossible to surmise in a blunt star rating. What it does contain, are images that will sear themselves into your brain, even though you will certainly not want them there.

Noble has a history of mental illness. His depression has led to stays in psychiatric hospitals. He is a worry and disappointment to his mother, after failing to settle down or live up to his early promise working with Catherine Tate and being part of a Perrier best-newcomer nominated act. To compound the misery, while he was working on this show, his girlfriend left him for its producer.

That was the tipping point that led Kim Noble Will Die to become the most elaborate suicide note in history. He says he will throw himself off Edinburgh’s North Bridge at the end of this run unless anyone stops him. There is nothing to suggest this is a bluff, but plenty to suggest he might just do it.

Half-dressed in a Superman outfit, his face smeared with white make-up like Heath Ledger’s Joker, he describes in uncomfortable detail his mental collapse – and he’s got the video evidence to demonstrate. There is genuine footage here of appalling self-harming, and that’s not even the most disturbing thing on show.

How is this comedy? You might very well ask. Well, some moments of comparative levity come firstly from him wanting to give something back. Sometimes this is simply in handing out fivers to strangers, but, after reading a Paul McKenna self-help book that said we all waste too much time, he’s doctored books and DVDs to provide much shorter versions of the original. His Gandhi, pared down to a few brief seconds of animation, is a delight.

It’s all good fun, but when you see what he seems to be doing to other items on the supermarket shelves you will want to alert the authorities – and will ensure you start checking the anti-tamper seals on everything you buy incredibly carefully. With most performers you would assume a joke, with the anguished Noble and his nihilistic disregard for society’s norms, you just don’t know.

As if the content wasn’t disquieting enough, Noble ensures that the audience never relaxes. One punter is made to spend the entire show in a corner with a bucket on his head, on which video of Noble and his mother are projected; at another point someone is evicted in a twisted parody of Big Brother-style programmes; and at the end we are all aggressively ordered out without ceremony, although a chosen few are kept back, to what nefarious end we cannot tell.

The entire experience is genuinely unsettling, but punctured with coruscating flashes of wit. Bold avant-guard art and a big joke on us all – or the genuine outpourings of a man who needs the sort of help that a Fringe audience isn’t qualified to offer? Who knows.