Ross Noble at Liberty Theatre for Fringe World 2023

Funnyman Ross Noble’s endearing comedy style is always at the forefront, even while talking about something as simple as having just spent the day at a school sports carnival. “My child was involved in it,” Noble clarifies to STM with his trademark quick-wittedness. “I’m not just a degenerate gambler walking by a school and thought ‘Children’s athletics, I’ll bet on that’.” So when COVID-19 hit and the Geordie comedian bunkered down on his Mornington Peninsula property with Aussie wife Fran and their daughters, Elfie, 14, and Willow, 9, one would be forgiven for thinking he might have gone rather stir crazy without being able to perform to a live audience. It turns out his ability to adapt had been years in the making. “People were losing their minds, being their house, in their pyjamas, day after day,” he recalls. “Stand-up comics could not be more equipped for that lifestyle because if I didn’t have kids, there’s no reason to get up before lunchtime. I did that for years. Before I had a family, that was my entire existence, so that didn’t affect me that much. And I also like my family, so that helped.” Work wise, as someone who had never experienced the structure of a 9-5 job, Noble replaced his cancelled tours by writing various scripts, with multiple projects continuing to bubble along including an animated movie musical he is developing with Fox in the US. He says it had been the case of having a bunch of half-finished scripts and ideas kicking around in his head for years with never enough time to crack on with them. And if he had not worked on them during the Victorian lockdowns, they never would have seen the light of day. “It was the closest thing I’ve had to a job where I just sat there writing,” Noble shares. “I ended up writing for other people as well, various different projects and stuff, which I can’t normally commit to because I have so much of my own stuff on.” Admittedly, his wife — who Noble met in Melbourne 22 years ago and instantly knew he wanted to marry because of her being utterly unimpressed by his comedy — took on the home schooling duties during this time. Noble is not going to pretend for a second he was of any assistance there. “I went in to see if my eldest daughter needed any help,” he says. “She was on a laptop and she didn’t even look up from it and said ‘If it’s art or drama, I’ll come and find you’. “They (daughters) understand what I’m doing when touring and doing live shows, and when I was on the West End doing a couple of musicals, they got their head around that too. “They take it all in their stride . . . whenever there’s something a bit daft and they look at me, like, ‘Sorry, what are you doing?’, that’s when I’m very fond of reminding them that this pays for everything they own, so don’t start getting all judgmental at me about being a weirdo. It’s the only reason there’s food on the table.” After being unable to perform at Fringe World 2022 because of WA’s closed border, Noble will take up a two-week residency at Liberty Theatre in Fringe World 2023’s new Liberty Fringe hub, with his aptly named show, On The Go. He promises the main difference between his cancelled 2022 shows and those he will do next year come down to set and music choices because, as anyone who has seen him live can attest to this, his shows are constantly changing. “I don’t write a show and then tour that for three years; it’s an amorphous blob of a thing,” he says. “It’s quite fashionable now to do a show on a theme, to talk about your struggles with what a hard life you’ve had in a hilarious but revealing way. I can’t be arsed for that. Fair play to people who do it, but I don’t know if I could go out and tell the same thing night after night. “If I reveal the dark truth about my life, if you do that once, don’t you think ‘Well, I’ve done that now, what’s next?’, but that’s got more to do with me being easily distracted.” It is why he does not reveal beforehand what his show will be about, not because he does not want to, but more because he cannot be 100 per cent sure himself. He is afraid of disappointing audiences by promising one topic he is currently obsessed about, but has moved on from by the time the show rolls around. “Talking about genies was a big thing for a while, where I was talking about genies a lot,” Noble explains. “But the problem is, if I tell people the show is about genies, by the time I get to that gig, the audience have read that I do a whole lot of stuff about genies, but I’ve got bored of it. Then they go ‘Well, he never talked about that thing’.” And much like a genie, it gives him the flexibility of infinite possibilities. “For me, stand-up is best when it’s alive and it feels like there’s an element of excitement and danger to it,” he says. “My favourite comics are people where, when you watch them, you’re not sure where it’s going to go and it takes you by surprise. If someone says ‘I’m going to talk about the trauma of my kitten dying’, well, I know exactly what this is going to be.” Noble’s residency is a highlight of Fringe World’s Liberty Fringe hub as it takes over Randal Humich’s gold rush-era Barrack Street building, the former cinema reopened to the public for the first time in 25 years. The old cinema room and basement will be transformed into two theatre spaces. At this stage, the hub will be solely a comedy venue, with comedy being Fringe World’s biggest genre, comprising 40 per cent of shows in the program. Fringe World senior producer Julia Martini says Humich was really invested in supporting creative industries and although the Fringe World team had not been looking for a third hub this year — initially they were only planning to do Perth Cultural Centre and The Pleasure Garden — they could not resist the opportunity to transform this hidden gem for the month-long festival. “We’ve had places like the Girls School before, which similarly pays tribute to our production team and our operations team, where they can take a site that’s absolutely nothing and turn it into something amazing,” Martini says. “We really love going into these places and transforming them into something you wouldn’t even expect could happen. Bringing life into it and bringing the Fringe into it, and that’s exactly what Fringe is about. It’s taking over these non-typical places for performance and making them perfect for that. “This just came up on our radar and we thought ‘Should we do it? Can we throw another hub in? Yes, we know we can.” Martini expresses the strange excitement everyone on the Fringe World team has to tackle a challenge of this kind after the previous two years of pandemic disruption, navigating contingency plans and lockdowns. “This is a challenge we know how to tackle,” she laughs. “Let’s go a bit wild after having to restrain ourselves for a while.” Noble shares this enthusiasm, and loves when old cinemas or theatres are given a new lease of life. “It’s going to be good because I’m there for a while and it’s a smaller venue, so I’m really looking forward to getting in there and having a bit of a sit-down, metaphorically not physically, with having a bit of a residency,” he says. And while fans may wonder how he will manage keeping his shows to 60 minutes in the Fringe World environment — his standalone gigs tend to be 2-2½ hours with interval, or “piss break” as he calls it — Noble assures he will be alright and is quite looking forward to the good discipline. “It’s that thing when if you have 1000 jokes to tell in an hour, sometimes it’s much better to take this one idea and just do that for the show,” he says. “Sixty minutes will just force me to go faster, won’t it? I go pretty fast anyway and sometimes you can see people who have never seen me live before, are a bit like ‘What’s happening? It’s too much.’” Ross Noble – On The Go is at Liberty Theatre, January 24-February 5.