Review by Steve Bennett

The duo behind Charm/Offensive seem almost embarrassed by their show – as well they might. The make no announcement in the bar above their venue that they are about to start, and once intrepid punters have ventured behind the closed door that gives little clue that a performance is about to start, Henry Fosdike and Sophie Petzal make such a low-key introduction to their show you could mistake it for an apology.

Stealing their show’s title from a Jimmy Carr tour, these two students are neither charming nor offensive. Well, all except for one appalling sketch which goes off the scale. In it, the double act give a talk all about rape, telling women to ‘just say yes’ and ‘take it right inside’, which is such a flippantly horrific approach to the topic in which victims become the targets for what would be a cheap laugh – had anyone been laughing. There are couple more ill-judged offhand references to paedophiles in the show, which is just tediously predictable, but this out-of-character sketch is baffling in its vile intent.

Their delivery, too, is appalling. Petzal just about has the basics of acting, demonstrated in one half-decent rant about TV police dramas, but Fosdike has a fringe that covers his eyes and delivers all his lines to the patch of floor just in front of his feet, with no attempt at making his characters anything but his miserable self. He has the demeanour of surly teenager dragged out to do this against his will, and performs with the charisma, emotional range and diction of a housebrick.

Not that his semi-coherent mumblings would have killed any jokes, as this is a largely punchline-free offering, with huge tracts of meandering, repetitive dialogue going nowhere. There is the odd glint of a decent idea – the Pearly Gates scene being one such example – but largely it’s so lazily offered you suspect they’d knocked the script on the train up from London… and had got bored by Peterborough.

They have a bash at double-entendres via a sketch based around a Scrabble commentary – thus allowing them to use any word they want, without any of that challenging need for any actual double-thinking. The scene contained both the lines ‘cum is now on the board’ and ‘penis is now on the board’ and several dreary variations on that theme.

Fosdike and Petzal lost most of their small audience well before their 45 minutes was up, but the only people who should really have walked out of this show was the performers, to give everyone a break.

Review date: 22 Aug 2010
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett