Ross Noble: Noodlemeister Apollo Theatre, London W1, until 2 October
When Ross Noble asks for some questions from the floor as the encore to his new West End show, a woman in the balcony asks what everyone is secretly wondering: 'Did you just make all of that up on the spot?'
Noble, for once, is rendered speechless with incredulity, since his formidable international reputation as a live performer rests on exactly these extemporising talents. From an audience member's glasses, posture or innocent remark, he creates whole fantasy worlds of Ninja assassins and animals that double as musical instruments.
'It's not so much a show, this,' he explains, 'it's more like watching an attention-deficit child for a couple of hours.'
The trick with this kind of improvised show is to weave some prepared material into the spur-of-the-moment riffing so that the seams are invisible, an accomplishment Noble shares with Eddie Izzard and Billy Connolly. He has some great setpieces here about inventive methods of male waxing and how to liven up the chain-ganged prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, but he's just as good at physical comedy. One of his best moments here was of people slipping in the Diana memorial fountain: 'They should have kept it open and just had the Benny Hill music playing all day - it's what she would have wanted.'
Two hours and then an encore is perhaps a bit too long, but it was worth the wait for the best joke of the night: Noble tells of buying his father, a Parkinson's sufferer, a present to cheer him up. It was a tambourine.
