SKILLS
SINGING
Hannah has been singing for as long she has been talking. Whilst at school she continually sang with multiple choirs all across the world and is highly skilled at choral/harmony singing. She has a huge vocal range from low F to C6 and is a strong Mezzo Soprano. She loves music and musicals, and feels passionately about music as a vehicle for emotion and its power to heighten and intensify storytelling. She has performed in musicals professionally and in many plays with music and song, and is always keen to be involved in projects that involve a music in any way at all.
In 2023 Hannah was on the “In the Frame” podcast where she talked about all things music, signing and storytelling. That can be listened to below
Here are some links to examples of Hannah’s singing, and some of her folk-style covers are available on her soundcloud below.
Here’s a link to Hannah’s Soundcloud for more and more recent tracks…
INSTRUMENTALIST
Hannah nonetheless plays a number of instruments to a competent show level and has played in many professional productions. She has played the clarinet and piano for many years and more recently has fallen in love with the accordion. She plays predominantly by ear. During the 2020/2021 Covid19 Lockdowns, Hannah taught herself to play the guitar and uses it to accompany her singing. Check out her SoundCloud for more of that!
Most significantly Hannah played the clarinet in Jordan Fein’s 2024 production of “Fiddler On The Roof” at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, where her duet klezmer clarinet/violin duet with Raphael Papo (composed my Mark Aspinall and Raphael Papo) was the emotional climax of the piece. Below are some images of the production and that moment specifically and reviews which reference the piece.
REVIEWS
In fact, the use of the fiddler, who sits with Tevye as he indulges in his famous monologues with God, and then plays along with the keening clarinet of Tevye’s daughter Chava (a lovely performance from Hannah Bristow) as she is turned from the family home when she elopes with her non-Jewish lover, creates some of the most resonant moments in the piece. WHATSONSTAGE - 5 Stars ★★★★★
Virtuosic Raphael Papo weaves throughout the action as the enigmatic Fiddler, performing a thrilling duet with Chava (Hannah Bristow), Tevye’s third daughter, on clarinet. Chava brings about his most painful crisis yet. Marching off through the alien corn, he leaves large questions — the nature of faith, family, homeland — for the audience to resolve. FINACIAL TIMES - 4 Stars ★★★★
But Fein’s arrestingly intelligent second-act directorial decisions, particularly around a clarinet-playing Chava (Hannah Bristow) and her disastrous marriage choice, deepen and darken the action and make the show richer and stronger than any recent London revivals. THE STAGE - 5 Stars ★★★★★
He disowns her, and there’s a heartbreaking instrumental duet between the fiddler (an incredible Raphael Papo) who’s been haunting Tevye on stage the whole time, and Bristow, who comes on with a clarinet in hand, serenading her own demise. TIMEOUT - 4 Stars ★★★★
The fiddler – often an afterthought – here becomes the driving force of the play, embodying tradition and God’s will. Raphael Papo’s haunting violin shadows Tevye from sunrise to sunset. When the pious father disowners his daughter Chava (Hannah Bristow), he upends his milk cart and Papo strikes up a lamenting duet with Bristow, who comes on with clarinet in hand….In a bold final image, it is Chava who takes up the perilous mantle on the wheat field roof, striding forward with a clarinet in hand, as her family walk up the roof and into the light: tradition they sing, as she watches on defiantly. THE JEWISH CHRONICLE
ACTING
Hannah is a strong improvisor and particularly enjoys devising work. She trained in puppetry with Complicité and in immersive theatre with Punchdrunk. She regularly works on projects which involve all these elements. She has worked with the director Sally Cookson (who creates work mainly through devising), on two occasions; and Hannah has also devised the show Rudolf, in which she played Rudolf, with the award winning Pins and Needles Productions. She has a strong comic instinct which developed during her time at university working with the Oxford Revue. She also enjoys more naturalistic productions with strong emotional character arcs; as well as productions with poetic language at their core as this allows her to revel in her love of words which she developed during her time studying literature at university.
DANCE AND MOVEMENT
Whilst at Bristol Old Vic, Hannah was trained in a wide variety of dance including partner dancing, period dance, ballet, tap and contemporary. She is a very physical performer. She has particularly developed this working with Sally Cookson on Jane Eyre and The Trojan Women.
Hannah has been sport fencing since school age, is highly skilled at Epee, and has continued this love of combat into her performing career. She has a distinction in her BADC Intermediate Certificate and has Advanced Certificates in Unarmed, Rapier and Dagger, Single Sword, Knife and Quarter staff. She has helped developed the combat for a production of Romeo and Juliet, which used sabres and toured the UK and Japan. More recently she has filmed a brand film which put this fencing skills to full use. The video can be watched here.
OTHER
Hannah is a very strong skier and has skied from an early age.
She is highly proficient at horse riding and has ridden since age 7. She can walk, trot, canter and gallop and is experienced in horse jumping.
Hannah has a full and clean driving license and has been driving consistently since 2012.
Hannah also writes poetry, stories and plays. For more of that see the writing section of this website.
Hannah is also a talented visual artist and spends a lot of her spare time on painting, drawing and photography. For more on that, see below and see her Instagram.
VISUAL ART
In her visual art creative practise Hannah is interested in fractalate patterns across nature and commonality of these paradigms across mutlipe substances and magnitudes. She loves the ways tree branches bend and sprout, the way rivers curl and split, the swirls in marble, and the way human blood vessels wind. She also likes drawing people.
