A poem by Jan Noble
Directed by Justin Butcher
Produced by Julia Holden & J Productions, Milan
“A rhapsodic paean to the trammelling ecstasy of loss. A trans-European odyssey turned safari of the soul.”
Body 115 is a modern miniature epic, a narrative poem, a tale of quest, a woven strand of inner and outer journeys from London to Paris to Milan, in explicit hommage to Dante’s Divine Comedy, written and performed by Jan Noble. Inspired by a lost love, spurred on by inner demons, our poet-hero sets out from the rain-washed, subterranean underworld of Kings Cross, where Boudicca once burned Roman Londinium to the ground, in company with the mysterious, lugubrious ‘Body 115’, the long-burned unidentified victim of the 1987 Kings Cross fire, who becomes Virgil to Jan’s Dante. Through the Brexit-riven runnels of the Thames Estuary they tramp, invoking ghostly memories of ancient English rebellion and civil strife, braving a tempestuous crossing of the Channel, to enter France through the limbo realm of the Jungle refugee camp, and into the slumbering battlefields of Normandy. Asleep on his feet, our poet-hero journeys on to Paris, where poet-ghosts of yesteryear throng the backstreets of Montparnasse, and so on at last to Milan, to confront his lost love on New Year’s day in the rain
“Modernity penetrating antiquity. Sensual, sad, passionate”
Justin Butcher
