'Stage Kiss' review — this American backstage comedy takes a wry look at intimacy

Read our review of Sarah Ruhl's play Stage Kiss, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 13 June.

Summary

• Sarah Ruhl’s Off Broadway play comes to the Hampstead Theatre
• Two exes find themselves co-starring in the revival of melodrama
• MyAnna Buring and Patrick Kennedy lead this UK premiere
• Blanche McIntyre directs Ruhl's metatheatrical piece

“Marriage is about repetition,” we’re told late in Stage Kiss, Sarah Ruhl’s 2014 Off Broadway play now arriving in London at the same address where her Letters from Max played to acclaim last year. But what does this two-time Pulitzer finalist have to say about kissing? That it can be messier and more impulsive, both onstage and off, or so the theatre folk in this play discover for themselves en route to the realisation that lasting partnerships constitute, in stage parlance, the equivalent of a long run.

At times, Stage Kiss plays like an American variant on Noises Off, proffering pratfall-prone glimpses of two (deliberately) dreadful plays-within-a-play – one in each act – inflected with nods towards both Coward and Pirandello so as to lend structural and thematic heft.

The beginning, with the house lights up on a bare stage that the designer Robert Innes Hopkins will fill later, finds a ditzy actress known only as She (MyAnna Buring) arriving to start rehearsals on a failed 1932 Broadway flop that is attempting a second lease on life in New Haven.

So what if this show – entitled, yes, The Last Kiss – contains multiple characters called Millicent and is about a dying woman called Ada whose illness is reversed upon her reacquaintance with a lover of old? She needs work (an anti-depressant commercial can’t pay the rent forever), even if her own ex-partner, the similarly generically named He (Patrick Kennedy), is revealed to be this ludicrous melodrama’s leading man. (“Are they playing some kind of fucking joke on us?” He asks, sounding for all the world like a swearier version of Elyot in Private Lives.)

A new prologue notwithstanding, The Last Kiss fails anew, only to find that play’s director (a droll Rolf Saxon) paying a post-interval house call to dangle before his erstwhile leads the prospect of a second play, I Love You Before I Killed You: or, Blurry, which the multi-hyphenate Adrian Schwalbach has this time written as well. Similarly steeped in absurdity, this latest effort is due to open in Detroit and charts the rapport between an IRA gunman and an ageing prostitute who would like to be an ophthalmologist.

The writer-director’s subtitle, Blurry, could as well apply to Stage Kiss, which refracts the difficulties of intimacy and romance through the prism of theatrical circumstance and mayhem: a broken ankle requires an understudy called Kevin (James Phoon) to step into He’s part, even if Kevin's method of kissing is to devour his castmate whole.

He and She are visited late in the play by each person’s successive partner en route to an ending that doesn’t make a lot of sense given our scant investment in Her’s husband, Harrison (Oliver Dimsdale), with whom she has a lippy daughter, Angie (Toto Bruin). Luxury casting finds Jill Winternitz, late of Dirty Dancing and Once, in ripely comic form as He’s girlfriend: a schoolteacher who expresses surprise that She is both pretty and funny.

You sense Ruhl wanting to honour the conventions of the very genres her play attempts to subvert, and it’s always tricky granting stage time to a play we’re told is poor – which Stage Kiss does rather a lot. The director Blanche McIntyre does what she can to make sense of the show’s whiplash shifts in mood. So does the hard-working Buring who is asked to morph from the klutz of the opening scenes to a sort of romantic sage: the result merits less a kiss than a polite peck on the cheek.

Stage Kiss is at the Hampstead Theatre to 13 June. Book Stage Kiss tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Stage Kiss (Photos by Helen Murray)