Gavin and Gavin: It's a Long Road That Doesn't Have A Bend

Comedy is perhaps the most versatile of all performance art. You can get away with doing anything on stage, as long as the crowd are laughing. It could be one bloke with a microphone. It could be five women balancing deckchairs on top of their heads. It could even be a flock of sheep bleating along in time to 'Das Deutschlandied'. The bottom dollar is: laughs = successful comedy show.

Of course it helps to have an overall premise, something that ties the show together, a raison d'être. A comedian that just kept cracking one-liners, no matter how funny, would quickly get tiring. Which leads us onto the main problem with Gavin & Gavin. These London lasses initially appear to be a well-rehearsed, amusing sister double act. But much like former Bosnian warlords, appearances can be deceiving.

After a ten minutes of amusing enough gags about being siblings, one is getting married, the other isn't and is a bit jealous etc etc, things soon begin to run out of steam. “This show is about change,” one of them chirrups. Which is fair enough, but doesn't explain why their show then becomes nothing more than cringingly bad impressions of their Irish parents and awful anecdotes about their wider family.

This sort of shtick probably goes down very well at dinner table at Christmas, but not with an audience who have come here to be entertained and don't give a damn about the people on stage's childhood holiday capers, laughing at drunken relatives. Quite frankly, Gavin & Gavin should be embarrassed to charge people money for this drivel.