Writer: Sarah Ruhl
Director: Blanche McIntyre
Receiving its UK premiere after opening in New York in 2011 comes Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss, a play about actors, acting and theatre, those kinds of subjects that an audience loves. With its onstage and offstage shenanigans, it’s a bit like Noises Off and, in some places, The Play That Goes Wrong. It’s generally very funny, but not very deep.
It begins with a female actor (the character’s name is She) turning up late and unprepared for an audition. The only thing she seems to be aware of in the script is that she has to kiss the male actor, but as he hasn’t been cast yet, she has to make do with Kevin, the director’s dogbody, who seems to have committed everyone’s lines to memory. But Kevin is a terrible actor, and as She discovers, an even worse kisser.
It’s surprising that the play that She is auditioning for has got the green light to go ahead. It’s frankly awful. She is to play Ada, a woman whose told that she has a month to live, but finds that she recovers once she is kissed by her ex-lover, who then runs away with her daughter. And it has songs too. As the frustratingly humble director tells She the plotline, Stage Kiss’s director Blanche McIntryre may want to slow the action down a little in order that the audience can laugh without missing the next incredulous plot twist of the 1930s period drama, The Last Kiss.
But fiction blurs into fact when, on the first day of rehearsals, She learns that the part of Ada’s ex-lover is to be played by her own ex-lover, He. Like Ada, She has a dull husband and a grumpy teenager. Like Ada, She is still smitten with her ex-lover, and their kiss on stage is more than a performance for a paying audience. It’s the real thing.
Of course, Ruhl’s play is about how we perform roles in everyday life, very much like Anya Reiss’s adaptation of A Doll’s House, currently playing at the Almeida or the Booker-nominated novel Audition by Katie Kitamura. However, unlike these examples, Ruhl’s ideas about performativity are almost obscured by the comical tomfoolery of bad actors acting badly. Even the second half, which promises a more profound analysis of role-playing with the appearance of designer Robert Innes Hopkins’ New York studio apartment, runs along the same tracks as the first, but the jokes are wearing thin by now.
MyAnna Buring is excellent in the lead role, half-ditzy actress, half-an ordinary woman of the world. Her accent work is brilliant, especially the Brooklyn twang she uses in She’s next toe-curlingly poorly-written play. And it’s no mean feat for a good actor to play a bad actor, and even when Buring’s character is not performing her role as Ada, one can see that She is still donning the roles of wife, mother, lover, ex-lover.
Patrick Kennedy’s He is more of a one-dimensional character, the driftless 40-something actor, struggling to find work. Kennedy shines in the second half when he becomes an IRA member. James Phoon is the endlessly goofy Kevin, while Rolf Saxon is very comical as the deluded director, believing that the trash he is making is art.
However, underneath all the comedy is little else. Perhaps this suggests that without roles to play, however regimented they are, there is little else to our lives, except, Stage Kiss appears to insinuate, love and forgiveness. Ruhl’s play is undoubtedly entertaining, but it could be cleverer.
Runs until 13 June 2026
