one4review | On 04, Sep 2026

With the pitch of a “live-action cartoon”, Noted is a frenetic physical comedy show from The Back Pack theatre company featuring a couple of cameras, 4 performers and over 400 pieces of paper. Each of the pieces of paper have illustrations of various objects or parts of objects which, through the power of mime and suspension of disbelief, the performers transform into props, costumes and backdrops.

The show, split neatly into 3 major set pieces, is obviously the culmination of months – if not years – of brainstorming and planning all the best ways to make use of the paper-prop idea, culminating in a truly gigantic amount of bits to work with. The performers slide through them all in a highly choreographed style, ripping off each piece of paper when a gag is completed to reveal the next one and diving straight in. Paper becomes backpacks, bullets and boats even, at one memorable point, the tentacles of a giant sea monster. A ceiling-mounted camera gives a birds-eye-view of a rotating table which, as paper is moved, flipped and discarded, fills with plates, then food as the performers rapidly bustle through the motions of the meal before becoming a spinning globe, then the next thing the the next. The ceiling camera is then used to film a wide variety of stunts as the performers lie on the floor or wheel themselves on trollies to act out parachute jumps or space adventures.

After a (slightly cringe-inducing) video package opening introducing us to the performers, the show moves from skit to skit with each of the objects at a truly breathtaking rate. This is a bit of a double-edged sword. While there is a huge amount of energy on display and the smoothness of the choreography is impressive, the constant number of moving parts on stage does make it hard to appreciate the jokes and situations as they go past or properly marvel at the hard work that has gone into some of the concepts, which feels a bit of a shame. The stage is often very busy and each performer always seems to have something to do, even if it’s just reacting to the actions of another or standing in the wings ready with the next prop to come on so it can be a little hard to know what you should focus on. Possibly this is me just being a bit too old to fully appreciate this kind of hyperactive performance and someone younger or more caffeinated would disagree, but I felt that slightly fewer bits with slightly more room to breathe would be easier to laugh at.

With this kind of high concept show, much relies on the quality of the ideas brainstormed up and, with ideas of this density, some are naturally going to be more effective than others. Fortunately, Noted has a high hit rate and while there were no ideas that truly blew me away, everything was effective enough to get a few surprised gasps and satisfied chuckles.

The one part that didn’t work for me and, judging from the muted response of the audience I wasn’t alone, was the final set-piece when the actions were being performed for the ceiling-mounted camera. There was actually nothing wrong with this as a concept and, indeed, it worked very well if you were only watching the action on the projector but, for reasons I cannot understand, the entire camera feed had a delay of around 30 seconds. This meant that you saw the performers doing the actions, not from the best angle, but well enough that you could figure out the gag and then, 30 seconds later, you saw it again from a better angle at which point the humorous events were no longer surprising or funny. I can only assume that this entire section was designed to be done in such a way that the audience were unable to see what was happening on stage before the actions on screen, potentially on a raised stage with non-tiered seating? But even from the ground position of the front row, I could see everything in advance of what was supposed to be happening and it managed to spoil any reveals or surprises. I originally thought that this was potentially leading to a series of gags where the performers would interact with their past selves on screen, but this was only done once and in a very simple way, meaning that every single other part of this final routine would have been improved if it was just shot in real time. It should be mentioned as well that this asynchronicity between what is on screen and what the performers are actually doing lead only to more issues with not knowing where to look at any one time to best appreciate the show.

A playful and experimental show but probably more suited to younger audiences who will find the visual (and literal) clutter more enticing than overstimulating.
*** 1/2
Reviewed by Tom
10.15 to 11.15
Assembly Roxy
Until 31st August