In one of the pranks in Kim Noble’s comedy show Kim Noble Will Die, he plays the audience a recording of his ex phoning up to tell him that she’s leaving him for his producer. He then urges the audience to text the pair. The show has run, off and on, for two years. Now she’s getting her own back. Noble says his ex has arranged fake bookings via e-mail — when he turns up to do the show, nobody’s there. So when he went to play at a disused factory in Zagreb, he feared the worst. “I thought I was going to die,” he says. “I got paranoid, I thought it was a set-up.” Thankfully, his Croatian fanbase turned out to be entirely genuine. Kim Noble Will Die returns to the Soho Theatre next week.
Block your ears dear, and enjoy the show
Dangerous theatre is often simply directors talking about reviving unloved German playwrights or covering their cast in mock offal. But Zippos Circus, now touring, offers real, oh-my-God-they’re-all-going-to-die fun. Sure, the production values won’t give Cirque du Soleil any sleepless nights. But the Globe of Death motorbike finale has three daredevils riding all angles of a small spherical cage at high speed — mere inches from the head of a woman standing in the cage. Theatre Diary found itself emitting the kind of visceral critical response that it wishes, in retrospect, it hadn’t uttered in quite such close proximity to its six-year-old daughter.