After her lyrical tribute last year to a gone-too-soon young poet, Letters from Max, Sarah Ruhl returns to the Hampstead Theatre with the same director, Blanche McIntyre, though this time in the main house and with larger forces. It’s a big-hearted, funny production.
Stage Kiss has a plot that’s almost Noel Coward-like in its ambitions: two actors who were once lovers are reunited in a 1930s melodrama, The Last Kiss, about a married woman, Ada, who is dying and wants to see her ex-lover one last time. The leads are required to kiss nine times per performance, 288 in the run in total reckons the leading lady’s husband. “She” (MyAnna Buring) – the title Ruhl gives her – is at first perturbed by the presence of He (Patrick Kennedy) in the cast, but they soldier on, stoking their smouldering former relationship with each clinch. Even when He breaks an ankle tripping over a plant on the set and has to perform the role on crutches, the show, and the serious kissing, goes on.
Much of the fun of the first half is in the dire dialogue and stilted gestures The Last Kiss obliges the cast to perform. Their director, Adrian Schwalbach (Rolf Saxon, pictured below, left with MyAnna Buring and Patrick Kennedy), is a cleverly projected puzzle, folksy and fatherly but either too dim to notice how awful the play is (“slippery” is his word for it} or happy to invest all his intelligence into getting the danged thing on. His only note is to ask the actors how they feel. He may or may not be attracted to the young and thrusting Kevin (James Phoon), who has been allocated four roles, as well as understudying He’s. Kevin’s attempts to lock lips with She when He retires hurt temporarily are hilariously inept, like a scuba diver determinedly chewing down on his breathing equipment.
We watch the production move from an empty space with chairs to a set with props and then a full staging with a proper curtain (we seem to be in well-heeled New Haven). Its wackiness mounts as musical numbers are added, along with a flurry of tap dancing and, in the last act, a spontaneous outburst of hoofing from Ada’s motormouth daughter (Toto Bruin), the maid and the butler. All the female characters other than Ada seem to be called Millicent, while the writers are the unholy trio of Erbmann, Landor and Marmel. “Isn’t it a bad sign when three people wrote a play?” comments He, astutely.
The second half also features a play, this one a new piece with a single author: Adrian Schwalbach, who has laughably titled it: I loved you before I killed you, or Blurry. It’s a “gritty, New York downtown sort of thing”, he proclaims to He and She while recruiting them to appear in it, commissioned by the “Detroit Actor’s Theater” (or DAT – what fun Ruhl has with DAT, sorry, that). He will play a Northern Irish IRA man, She a bedraggled “hure” with a murderous pimp (Kevin), in a set identical to the drab apartment He is living in.
This burst of real life into the proceedings doesn’t alter the fact that this play is every bit as ghastly as The Last Kiss, which meanwhile has been seeping into the actors’ speech patterns and behaviour. Even She’s Husband (Oliver Dimsdale, pictured below, left, with MyAnna Buring as She and Jill Winternitz as Laurie) is affected, suddenly breaking into a song mid-speech that becomes a quartet. And now He has to tell his young teacher girlfriend Laurie (a spirited Jill Winternitz) that it’s over between them. More twists are to come, one deservedly raising a big laugh.
These two internal plays, with their two-dimensional characters fall ludicrously short of depicting the complex nature of real grown-up relationships, especially marital woes, which the play's broader frame has to resolve. Ruhl gives the proceedings an ending some may judge overly soft, but there’s a poignant undercurrent to it here that makes it work.
The casting is ideal. Buring moves from the scatty actor and screwball rhythms of the first half, her Ada voice shading into Katharine Hepburn’s, to the tough tones of the “hure” of the second half, where she is kitted out like Blondie on a bad day. Finally, the real She re-emerges, a woman apparently waking up to reality, whereas He seems stuck in his stage persona, practising “false exits” to the last. There Is a cool sarcastic streak to He that makes him a tricky character to root for, but Kennedy has charm and impishness to spare. A shoutout too for Oliver Dimsdale, who holds his own as both She’s husband and Ada’s spouse, Harrison, even in Bermuda shorts and a blazer.
The whole works a treat in the main house’s ample space, which Robert Innes Hopkins’s designs make the most of. In the second half, in particular, his conversion of Laurie’s downbeat Hell’s Kitchen apartment into a street outside is impressively done. There's also a supreme stage-lighting moment, when Schwalbach can be heard demanding of the lighting guy a Hell’s Kitchen twilight "in mid-November”. Oliver Fenwick duly obliges.
It’s hard to conjure up a British equivalent to Ruhl, niftily juggling meta themes with standard comedy of manners tropes as she probes the line where real life blurs with stage life. She brings a sly but warm, grounded humour to the material that allows the audience to sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s a welcome treat right now.
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