Live comedy-performance art review

Seven years in the making, Kim Noble’s new show offers an unflinching embrace of what most people would find repulsive. It is repugnant, morbid and morally dubious – yet if you have the stomach for it, Lullaby For Scavengers as remarkable as it is confronting.

For Noble, a lonely outcast desperate for connection, displays a love for the unloveable that’s as tender as it is nauseous. He adopts a maggot as his ‘daughter’, makes an animatronic puppet from a dead squirrel – reincarnated, perhaps, from a guilt at having poisoned it as a pest – and performs on a stage littered with the corpses of roadkill foxes. And there’s a dead pigeon in a microwave.

Yet this is tame compared to what the comedian and performance artist shows on video in graphic detail: from sitting a bath full of squirming larvae (and worse) to some gruesome taxidermy, and even a scene in which he attaches a painful contraption to his ball.

Noble finds some empathy with the maggot, universally reviled yet fulfilling a vital function, breaking down the rotting flesh of the dead. The parallels between Noble’s day job as a cleaner, barely noticed by the staff in the insurance office where he works (and covertly films them) are obvious. The presumably homeless man spouting nonsense outside Noble’s local Sainsbury’s is even more overlooked.

Further notes of discomfort come when he ropes his dying father into his show, and an Oedipal scene involving his mother, both of which add to the disorienting and mournful tones of the piece, inspired, he says by the work of contentious 1960s conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. In a world where ‘saying the unsayable’ is a canny commercial move, Noble remains genuinely provocative – abhorrent, even – in creating his niche performance.

His commitment to making his art is insane. He joins in a neo-Nazi march for what amounts to about five seconds of the finished show. He camps out by a foxhole for days on end to try to make a connection with this scavenger. And he frequently degrades and dehumanises himself in the name of making a point.

This all sounds very bleak, but as with the other two parts of his long-running trilogy – 2009’s Kim Noble Will Die and 2015’s You’re Not Alone –  Noble injects a murky, mordant humour into his work, to add to the nervous, awkward laughs that try make the abhorrent less scary. Though at other times  even the most robust souls may be wincing too much to laugh.

But Noble has again created a show unlike any other, outside of his own grimy netherworld.

• Kim Noble: Lullaby for Scavengers is at the Soho Theatre  until  September 24 then again from March 15 to April 8

Review date: 22 Sep 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Soho Theatre