The witty and charming pair Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna give us a beat poetry rom-com ballad that, while not groundbreaking, at least treads old ground with the comfort and warmth of a battered old shoe. The premise is familiar: Richard and Katie (the characters helpfully retain the performers’ names) are everyman-and-woman thirty-something singletons who meet on a night out, have a one night stand, and then spend the next two years overcoming every awkward mishap, obstacle, and missed opportunity modern sexual relations can throw at them to actually fall in love.
Yes, we are in very Four Weddings territory here, and the whole story is suffused with the commonplaces of white middle class existence: tiny hotel kettles, gluten-free croissants, Glastonbury, bad dancing, and awful sloaney friends called Ceci who use the phrase OMG unironically. But the sharpness of the observation and the smooth rhyming lift this above a dull retread of someone’s Saturday night: how many of your friends would describe indigestion as having their ‘bowels attacked by owls with trowels’? And while Richard’s geeky beta-male is trapped in the familiar sit-com position between Etonian bankers and northern macho idiots, he plays both types so well that he avoids stereotyping too maliciously.
I enjoyed watching two romantically-desperate people narrate their own perspectives of the same story; sitcoms like Peep Show, with similarly awkward protagonists, suffer from showing us only the male side of things. Here, both Bonna and Marsh show their insecurities and flaws, both doing and saying stupid things in very different ways. The strangeness of falling in love with your best friend is tenderly presented without ever losing an eye to the merciless comedy in the problems it creates - this is indeed a love story with dirt. What we end up with is in many ways a traditional love ballad in rhyme, transposed to the modern day with all its unique problems – the backdrop is a pixelated heart, after all. The will-they-won’t-they may get a bit tedious after 40 minutes or so, but the belly laughs keep coming nonetheless. The two have a wonderful chemistry together, and I hope they write this kind of stuff for a while yet; we need more proper romantics in the world.
