Warren & Hanbury: All To Bare

Jennifer Warren and Charlotte Jo Hanbury describe themselves as "smalltown girls", but in neither of their home countries (Canada and Wales, respectively) could there possibly exist a town small and boring enough to inspire someone to create such attention-seeking gibberish.

Nobody enjoys Warren & Hanbury more than Warren and Hanbury. Watching them is like witnessing an hour-long in-joke that is alienating, immature and irritatingly self-indulgent. Neither can honestly call herself a comic – they stand onstage and raise an occasional chuckle, but comedy is clearly not their true talent. Rather, it is the ability to disable whatever part of the brain is responsible for inhibition and coherence. When the laughs come, it seems completely down to chance, resting on delivery rather than genuine humour – the show is devoid of ideas.

Despite their infantile material, they are undeniably gifted performers. Hanbury has an incredible singing voice, while the two share a nervous, spasmodic and knowingly wooden style of acting that makes them a perfectly suited double act. Unfortunately this is wasted on lurid gang rape jokes and an infantile, seemingly endless Brokeback Mountain parody.

To cap it all off—and this ruins no surprises—the pair take their bows, vanish and then re-emerge completely naked. "This is too much for my eyes," wails one departing audience member; "I’m going to kill myself," says another. Smugly resorting to the cheapest shock tactic there is, the pair gather their props, silently pleading: "Look at me, look at me, look at me!"