Gig review by Steve Bennett at the Brighton Fringe

It’s a bit of a rowdy Friday-night crowd for Foil, Arms and Hog’s Brighton Fringe show – but for a sketch trio, these three are well-equipped for the challenge.

They are loose with their performance – sometimes so loose as to lose sight of a skit’s drive, but more often free to banter with the audience, free to go off-script to give the performance a unique patina. You know things won’t go exactly the same way two nights running: whether it’s the way they lock one of their members out of this converted shipping container of a venue; the way they interact with an audience ‘victim’ who’s very slow to grasp what’s required of her; or the particular way they cut loose with party games and playful interaction.

Their style is in the same high-energy, pseudo-chaotic ballpark as Pappy’s or Klang – something of a template for three-man sketch teams. There is a bit of a difference in that they try to adopt different characters for the skits, rather than maintaining the same heightened personalities throughout, but the distinction is gossamer-thin.

Hog (Sean Flanagan) is usually the fool. There’s a touch of Marty Feldman about him when he’s a fawning serf, or a bit of Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man in a skit about learning to speak in Dublin slang. Sean Finegan (Foil) is nominally the leader, at least taking some responsibility for what’s happening. Connor McKenn (Arms) can be the Oliver Hardy type, seemingly straight but actually dumb, although he most relishes the chances he gets to go stupidly over-the-top, whether as a brutal Germanic nurse or an ‘oh no you di’nt’ stereotype of a black American woman.

This latter sketch is a particularly deft one, with the group setting up a premise that allows themselves to dance in a minefield of potential racism, but with just enough self-awareness and context to keep their tongue in cheek and offence at bay.

High concepts underpin much of their work, though there is some overlap with innovators who got their first. A sketch in which the audience is explicitly acknowledged is straight out of the Larry Sanders Show handbook; the whore-heavy medieval sketch is Pythonesque, especially in the unfeminine female characters and horse-less noblemen; and strangely there’s an audience game similar to one performed by Tom Walker in the show that won him the best newcomer gong at last month’s Melbourne Comedy Festival. They can’t possibly have seen it; it’s pure serendipity.

And Foil, Arms & Hog make all these scenes their own – bold, playful, fun – until a strike of an on-stage cymbal brings each to an end, like an audible blackout. The ideas are strong, as is the writing…. sometimes. But it doesn’t really matter, the big, brash performances are what sells it, and it’s impossible not to get swept up in their enthusiasm.

Review date: 7 May 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett