It’s taken Kim Noble seven years to make Lullaby for Scavengers. Just as well: I doubt any of us could take a show like this more than once a decade. There will be many who’d rather not take it at all, and I’d struggle to argue with them. This is an hour in which the notorious comic and performance artist injects his semen into a dead squirrel, molests his own mum, and inserts a maggot into his – well, you get the picture. All of this is beamed onscreen while Noble and his stuffed-rodent sidekick orchestrate the multimedia floorshow from a control desk centre-stage.
Like all his work, Lullaby scrapbooks together DIY videos from the 47-year-old’s life, to conjure with loneliness, filial and parental yearning, and the human/animal divide. Onscreen and onstage, Noble depicts his relationship with his maggot daughter, whom he takes to see the musical Jersey Boys, and – hilariously – appoints as partner-in-crime in a restaurant scam. We meet the reanimated squirrel who once lived, and rutted, in Noble’s attic, and the deceased fox to whose orphaned cubs our host, going feral in nocturnal London, appoints himself guardian.
