From 1980 till 1981 he worked at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, producing the Duchess of Malfi, which won him the London Drama Critics' Award and the Circle Theatre Award (also for his production of Doktor Faust, and as Best Director for A Doll's House in 1980).
He also directed the French version of his production of The Duchess of Malfi under a tent at the Carré Silvia Monfort in Paris (1981).
[4] In 1980 he became assistant director at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) where his first production was Alexander Ostrovsky's The Forest.
His production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1994) was popular enough to be revived two years later, and Noble also turned it into a film adaptation in 1996.
[7] In 2007, he took Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean to Malvern, Bath and Brighton, before it transferred to the West End in the spring of that year.