Tuesday, August 2, 2016
'An Evening with Cock and Fanny' at the Hen and Chickens, 1st August 2016
What better way to spend a drizzly and miserable Monday evening than with Cock and Fanny? Ho ho ho, but seriously folks - I'm not talking about fucking. I'm talking about An Evening with Cock and Fanny (FYI if you're at work I don't recommend Google image searching that title), a sketch comedy show nestled in the performance space above the Hen and Chickens pub. Cock is Matthew Howell and Fanny is Lauren Taylor, and they're setting out to prove that sketch comedy isn't dead.
Granted, though it might not actually be dead, it is definitely very nearly dead. Back in the 90s and 2000s you couldn't move without tripping over some star-studded sketch behemoth: be it The Fast Show, Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show or many, many more. You'd think that the era of YouTube and self-publishing would have brought about a renaissance, but apparently not. Now Howell and Taylor have banded together to "have one last crack at the sketch comedy whip".
Let's get the most important thing out of the way early on - Howell and Taylor are funny. Seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many performers fail to clear this very simple bar. Very, very broadly they fit your archetypal Two Ronnies style class differences - Howell tending to play Hugh Grantishly clueless poshboys and Taylor playing straightforward working class women. It's a comedy combo as old as the hills - cos it works.
Helping things is their obvious chemistry - they started as 'bickering' housemates and have a rock-solid feel for each other's rhythms and comic timing. Being able to sense that their comedy partnership is organic rather than artificial works wonders, we feel as if we're in on the joke.
However, when it comes to the actual material things are a bit rough around the edges. The obvious highlight is a genius sketch in which a man who's been in a relationship for ten years confesses that he doesn't know his partner's name. Firstly, I'm terrible with names, so I can sympathise with the poor guy. Secondly, there's a surreal beauty to the situation compounded by how well the pair have thought through how this could work. Also, it's got a killer punchline. Gently twisted reality like this reminds me of my personal sketch faves: Chris Morris' Blue Jam.
There's a couple of other decent ideas for sketches, though a couple aim for targets too big and obvious. For example one about contemporary picky eaters (vegans, gluten-intolerance, allergies and so on) is performed fairly well, though this it navigates overly well trodden comedic ground. Other sketches suffer from going on a couple of seconds too long - once the punchline has been delivered we're just spinning wheels until the next scene.
On top of that there's the straightforward observation that there just isn't much to the show. Despite some admirable attempts to pad things out with fourth wall busting connective tissue, there's only maybe 5 or 6 sketches and the curtain falls a mere 35 minutes after it rises. As a critic it's quite refreshing to be home before 9pm, but I doubt I'd be quite so generous if I'd forked out for a ticket.
Despite this, Howell and Taylor genuinely do have something. They're both personable and charismatic, share a promising imagination and, once more for emphasis, they're both actually funny. But this isn't quite the show it could be: while it succeeds at being basically entertaining it's crying out for a bit more content and some judicious editing. I'm not too worried - this pair have clearly got the goods, they just to deploy them a bit more effectively.
★★
An Evening with Cock and Fanny is at the Hen and Chickens until 4 August. Tickets here.
Tags:
comedy ,
hen and chickens ,
lauren taylor ,
matthew howell ,
sketch ,
theatre
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