There’s a sort of stage work that you might call theatre for people who don’t think they’re up to theatre, either in general or on a particular evening. It may look and feel less like drama than like storytelling, stand-up, or other such forms, and it thrives on the fringe where dividing lines blur more easily, particularly the Edinburgh Fringe. Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna’s two-hander about how a man named Richard Marsh gets together with a woman named Katie Bonna won a Fringe First in Edinburgh in 2012, and now comes to a West End venue where, for decades, that blurred dividing line has run through the middle of the stalls.

Not to put too Nora Ephron a point on it, this is When Richard Met Katie. After an initial drunken night together their paths keep awkwardly crossing, one of the crucial episodes is a road trip, and the climactic declaration comes not on New Year’s Eve but at the christening of their respective best friends’ sprog. One of said friends even remarks that it’s like a Meg Ryan movie, but that’s not enough to disarm the comparison. Stylistically, it’s a double-header rom-com performance poetry slam. Yes, it’s written in verse... or, if one assumes that each writer pretty much penned their own character’s lines, in verse on Bonna’s part and doggerel on Marsh’s. The stage is bare save for a couple of high bar-style stools; occasionally a bare suggestion of location is flown or schlepped on – here a mirror-ball, there an artificial-grass parasol.

The show has had a long and successful life as performed by its writers; now, though, Felix Scott plays Richard Marsh and Ayesha Antoine is Katie Bonna. This indefinably means that it’s no longer not-quite-theatre, with two people playing versions of themselves. It’s now actual Acting. Scott, and in particular Antoine, are fine actors, but the material doesn’t quite stand up any more in this light. It offers a basket of chuckles and a few especially well-turned moments (the morning after the first night, She [on the rebound]: “It’s strange, it being a different person” – He [just desperate]: “It’s strange, it being a person”). However, it now feels as if it needs to be more than simply 85 minutes of feelgood throwaway.

Written for the Financial Times.