A poem by JAN NOBLE
Directed by JUSTIN BUTCHER
Produced by JULIA HOLDEN & J PRODUCTIONS, Milan

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.

COMING SPRING 2022