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Ross Noble Royalty Theatre Wed 1 March Normally it's bad form to reveal punchlines in a comedy review. After all, that's what people are paying money to see, so you don't exactly want to distill the best three minutes of a performer's routine down into two sentences and leave the audience to wade through 40 minutes about, say, how men and women think differently. Thank god, then, for Ross Noble: for one thing, he doesn't work with hackneyed notions like "punchlines" or "routines". For another, the show I saw tonight will be wildly different than the show you'll see tomorrow, so if I'd wanted to quote his best lines I can rest assured that you'll get 80 exclusive gems from the man. Noble can't help but be funny, but I got the feeling that he was struggling a little at first tonight. He's never been afraid of picking on an audience member and running with it for the entire show, but there were a few unexpectedly sharp edges to his put downs to a late arrival who, idiotically, decided that he'd subsequently attempt to match wits with the professional comic. And great though Noble's prepared material was (especially his glitter story - oh, you'll know when you hear it...), it was those improvised moments when he shone brightest, whether dancing around in his imaginary bouncy bus in Happy Valley, miming a series of churches trying to hide, or responding to an would-be comedian audience member's complaint that the interval was "anticlimactic" with "Well, that's not really down to me - I wasn't looking for a critique on the conventions of the theatre." OK, maybe you had to be there: I laughed like a drain. And kudos to a performer who can turn a technical mishap like a dodgy mic into a killer routine in itself. The show's length works against it: at around two hours plus interval it's never less than hysterically funny, but as midnight approached the energy level in the room dropped noticeably and jokes that would have warranted a round of applause 40 minutes earlier raised barely more than a chuckle. Still, there wasn't a dissatisfied face in the departing crowd.  |
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