Warren & Hanbury: All To Bare - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Jennifer Warren and Charlotte Jo Hanbury are appealing performers with a distinctive line in strange, unsettling and quirky comedy, distilled into a show unlike anything else you’ll see at the fringe.

As an audience member, they play ‘chicken’ with your patience as they drive flimsy, surreal ideas into the ground, generating some laughs of nervous frisson as you wonder nervously whether this stilted ‘anti-comedy’ is actually the show. Turns out it is, which is what makes it so difficult to recommend: At 11.15pm in one of the hottest sweatboxes of the festival, few Fringe-goers will want their patience tested this way, as evidenced by the walkouts.

There’s an over-long, badly-acted Brokeback Mountain spoof, an over-long, badly-choreographed dancing skit, an over-long, bad-taste skit about the Queen enjoying her shits, and an over-long, badly-recorded audio segment of he duo just umming and aahing to fill in a gap between sketches. There’s definitely a pattern in this car-crash comedy, as you watch to see just what they dare serve up next.

Canadian-born Warren has a touch of the Sandra Bernhard about her; the same angular, unconventional good looks and the same ‘screw you’ stance towards the audience as she performs with more attitude than ability. Elegant Welshwoman Charlotte Jo Hanbury is more a conventional character comedian, with musical talent to boot, though plays second-fiddle to her more in-your-face co-star.

Together, they are playfully awkward; though for much of the show they perform solo – missing a trick as their stilted interaction is something for the credit side of the show’s ledger. Their weirdness is appealing, but it needs to be affixed to something more substantial to hold the audience’s attention, as such unfocussed strangeness is just too easy to switch off to.