Jan Noble shows us how to take pleasure in words again. One hour of literary and poetic brilliance. 

As soon as Body 115 was over, I wanted to watch it all over again. Jan Noble stunned with both his writing and performance in this beautifully moving saga of love and loss. It is centred on ‘Body 115’, the name given to the unidentified victim of the 1987 King’s Cross fire. Brought back to life by Noble, the victim exists as a ghostly companion to the narrator who guides us through different eras, countries, and dimensions. In only one hour, Noble expands fact into fiction and blurs the boundaries of time and place; he makes magic on stage. 

Bodies and souls are detached in Noble’s work as we travel across the Channel to the refugee camps in Calais and to the cities of Paris and Milan, meeting literary icons as we pass through. I can only describe it as a kind of dreamscape. Noble creates a space of possibility where iPhones and selfies are concurrent with Keats and ‘Chaucer’s gang’. Body 115 clearly pays tribute to Dante’s Divine Comedy with Noble himself envisioning the afterlife as a network of states and conditions through which one travels, and it is this movement, this transit, which is so well executed in Noble’s work. The victim of the fire, ‘Body 115’, is the guide to the narrator, the Virgil to Noble’s Dante. Despite the play’s subject matter and associations being somewhat historical, there is an undeniably modern feel to Body 115. At points throughout the supernatural journeying, the narrator muses on lost love, divorce and relationships. The relatability of these self-exploratory moments lifts the play and gives it that much needed contemporary relief. 

1987 is an interesting date to centre the work on, a time of change and a time of newness. Politically, culturally, and socially, things were shifting in Britain. Thatcher’s era saw strikes, wars, new technology, Tory control, disillusioned youth, and protest. A bit like what’s happening now in 2023. In an interview talking about the King’s Cross Fire, Jan Noble claims the incident was ‘part of the old decaying London – with smoking allowed in tube stations that had wooden escalators – and the beginning of the new one’. The wooden escalators were replaced, new safety precautions were put in place, and things changed. But Body 115 is also concerned with things staying the same, and how there will always be that ever-present, decaying underworld to Britain’s capital. 

Being a one-man show, the attention is ultimately all on Jan Noble, but in no way does he shy away from the feat of an hour-long epic monologue. The energy and power he brings to the stage is addictive to watch and I was held in a trance from beginning to end. The sound design by Jack Arnold has to be mentioned, an element which enables Noble’s words to come to life and to evolve from poetry into theatre. The light design by Tom Turner also aids in the transporting effects of Body 115, supporting the audience through the, at times, confusing changes between scenes and places. Body 115 is showing at The Hope Theatre in Islington from the 5th – 13th May. Not to be missed.