The stage or screen kiss has always made audiences speculate (often correctly; my mother is still not over Brad and Angie) as actors negotiate something that’s both intimate and sterility professional. It's the tension Sarah Ruhl toys with in Stage Kiss, finally receiving its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre 12 years after it debuted in New York.
We open in a classic audition room: mismatched chairs, institutional lighting, a flamboyant director (Rolf Saxon) who wants his actors to ‘follow their instinct’. The trouble is that nobody's instincts are particularly good. He reaches for the word ‘slippery’ to describe his first play - apt for everything that follows. MyAnna Buring's She arrives in a ball of anxiety, fumbles her lines, drops her bag, and gets the part anyway. The play she's cast in, a forgotten 1930s melodrama called The Last Kiss, is packed with longing and terminal illness, and also coincidently features He (Patrick Kennedy), her old flame. His expression upon recognising her suggests that the flame was never quite extinguished.
Because of this, the first act is comedically theatrical – Stoppardian, even – a loving homage to the absurdity of the rehearsal room, the set blooming gradually into the full gilt aspirations of the play. After the interval, Robert Innes Hopkins’s design makes a decisive lurch from red velvet to the grubby reality of He’s flat, and then to a director’s nostalgia project set in ’70s New York, featuring a Bronx sex worker and an Irish soldier in a relationship far less glamorous than anything preceding it. The romance deflates under the blue city lights and an uglier, more toxic history between She and He surfaces – one that spotlights nearly every reason the intimacy coordinator exists now. Thankfully, Stage Kiss does have one: Yarit Dor executes these scenes with exactly the right amount of discomfort.
Buring's leap from frantic and unsure to hollow and sardonic is a touch disjointed, though she's believable in both modes. Kennedy plays the deadbeat actor with cool conviction. The supporting cast land the comedy with near-perfect timing: Oliver Dimsdale's hapless husband, James Phoon rotating cheerfully through a range of (Kevin/Butler/Doctor/Pimp), Jill Winternitz and Toto Bruin doubling nimbly with the same intentional over-acting as the rest of the cast. It's a testament to Blanche McIntyre that she directs both the play and the plays-within-it – the latter deliberately, deliciously badly.
The dialogue is zigzagging, joyfully absurd with the right amount of twists. The tension between the hamminess of Act One and the grit of Act Two is a juxtaposition rarely staged this openly - and if it never quite commits to either, Ruhl's comedy holds it together. In the end, what Stage Kiss leaves you with is something approximately profound, but above all, very entertaining.
