Body 115
Jan Noble
Body 115 is a mini verse-drama, a tale of inner and outer journeys in explicit homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy written and performed by poet Jan Noble.
From the rain-washed, subterranean underworld of Kings Cross, ‘Body 115’ - the long unidentified victim of the 1987 fire - becomes Virgil to Noble’s Dante. A voyage of discovery and recovery, embracing decay and gentrification, a sense of place and the need to escape. Invoking ancient rebellion and civil strife, through London runnels to picturesque Kent, we meet Marlowe at Millwall and Keats at Gravesend. Led from the limbo realm of a Calais refugee camp to the slumbering battlefields of Flanders, we travel to Paris where poet-ghosts of yesteryear throng the backstreets of Montparnasse. And at last, to Milan, in a season of wet weather, we arrive to find that more than just the rain awaits. This one hour, one person show is an energetic blend of theatre and richly lyrical poetry. A rhapsodic paean to the trammelling ecstasy of loss. A trans-European odyssey turned safari of the soul.
‘Where theatre meets poetry, local history and time travel, Jan Noble has gilded tonsils’ ****
London Pub Theatres Magazine.
From the rain-washed, subterranean underworld of Kings Cross, ‘Body 115’ - the long unidentified victim of the 1987 fire - becomes Virgil to Noble’s Dante. A voyage of discovery and recovery, embracing decay and gentrification, a sense of place and the need to escape. Invoking ancient rebellion and civil strife, through London runnels to picturesque Kent, we meet Marlowe at Millwall and Keats at Gravesend. Led from the limbo realm of a Calais refugee camp to the slumbering battlefields of Flanders, we travel to Paris where poet-ghosts of yesteryear throng the backstreets of Montparnasse. And at last, to Milan, in a season of wet weather, we arrive to find that more than just the rain awaits. This one hour, one person show is an energetic blend of theatre and richly lyrical poetry. A rhapsodic paean to the trammelling ecstasy of loss. A trans-European odyssey turned safari of the soul.
‘Where theatre meets poetry, local history and time travel, Jan Noble has gilded tonsils’ ****
London Pub Theatres Magazine.