By Ron Bingham
The premise of this show is that Lizzie and Juliette were together about eighteen months ago, with one having been dumped and the other long term single, watching a marathon session of romantic comedies. One of them then persuaded the other to do a road test of the ‘getting together’ (hitching up, falling in love, whatever) scenario’s of the best films in the genre to prove whether the movies were based in reality in any way. I will confess right now that I have only seen one of the hundred movies on the list (Love Actually, in the cinema with a female friend many years ago) so I had to take their word for the plots and lines used.
They had a couple of rules for this experiment, with the most important one being that they would be honest. They went through a few films and eliminated some on the basis of danger, location, employment etc, showed a couple of the attempts and how disastrous they were (or not), had a few that were still waiting on results (one of the potential romances was going to be in the audience the next day for their penultimate performance) and there was a long sequence involving them using actors to see if they could fall in love with a ‘worst enemy’ type.
I would use examples of specific films and the situations if I had any recollection of which films were involved with what but I don’t want to appear a total fool. Just accept that Liz and Juliette were experts on the subject of the romantic comedy genre and, if there was a Mastermind for this, they would be Grand Champions. I won’t give details of the finale but the conclusions they make from their experiment in love, that being confident, honest and open seems to be a good thing, shouldn’t really surprise anyone. The journey to finding that conclusion out was the important thing, and some of the taped segments will have you shedding a tear over the emotions expressed.
Rom Com Con is on at The Cannons’ Gait
http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/mace-and-burton-rom-com-con