BlackCatfishMusketeer

It sounds like every other modern love story: two people meet online and fall in love. But this beautiful, bumbling three-hander leapfrogs over other couples to dig its way into your heart. It runs wildly, whacking the opponents with a drumstick along the way, and then awkwardly stops right behind you, waiting for you to turn around and realise that it's what you've been looking for all along.

A man (Ste Murray) and a woman (Catherine Russell) match on a dating app. As they chat, a human incarnation of the internet (Aoife Spratt) watches. Spratt is a digital cupid, a judgemental, nosy, sarky, hilarious, geeky middle-man. In her retro haze, she highlights the modern realities of knowledge sharing, of not fully reading articles, of GIFs and pictures replacing words in our flirting vocabulary. When the relationship jolts or pauses, she is the desperate friend trying to pull them back together.

With the burden of a past event that can’t help but breed distrust and fear of intimacy, the decision to turn the funny face on a screen into a fully dimensional human being takes an astronomical leap of trust. In this way, Dylan Coburn Gray’s seemingly frivolous production carries a huge weight as it deals with something society still isn’t very good at talking about.

BlackCatfishMusketeer fizzles with charm, but it’s not the extraordinary lives or remarkable staging that makes it so endearing. It is the mundanity. These encounters, these beginnings, these GIFs sent late at night to a stranger you feel a connection with – they're happening everyday. It is a deeply hopeful, humorous, delicate exploration of modern dating, of fear and trust, of suggestive ellipses, of love.