Most of us nurture dreams of love. The cultural inheritance that informs Western ideals of heterosexual romance is instantly recognisable in this series of stylistic sketches from Side-Show Productions.

The gilded consummation of Mills and Boon tarnishes when transcribed to the mundane, where only kettles reach boiling point. A love triangle where a competitor is rejected because he ‘rents, not owns’ leads to a cartoon-like fist fight, while Juliet directs a baffled modern Romeo to be ‘more like a man’.

Power ballads from Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You to the classic Blue Moon provide an ironic score to episodes that are occasionally warm and wry, though one of the more insightful - about a marriage of fairytale appearance with a dark power play at its heart - loses impact through repetition. This hinders a number of scenes, making performative traits less engaging as the production progressed.

Following an initial flirtation, I left the theatre feeling that I’d almost – yet not quite – made it to ‘first base’ with someone I liked. A first date with promise.