Stage Kiss at Hampstead Theatre – review

Two plays within a play, Stage Kiss is about the difference between fiction and reality, between the spark of a new romance and the enduring glow of a long-term commitment; between a kiss and the idea of a kiss.

She’s been out of the acting game for a while, but, sod’s law, her first play in a while and the leading man is her long-ago ex. At first they awkwardly tussle, but it’s not long before boundaries drop and, despite her husband and child, and his maybe-girlfriend, they’re back in the old romantic rhythm. The play is terrible, the critics agree. But it doesn’t matter because it brought them back together.

“She” (MyAnna Buring) is a charming gabbler; desperately tripping through one sentence to get to the next, like a character in an Amy Sherman-Paladino show. “He” (Patrick Kennedy) appears at first to be calm and sure of himself but eventually reveals his emotional immaturity. Not only do Buring and Kennedy have great romantic chemistry, but you can also feel a historical disappointment between them when they remember why they broke up in the first place.

It’s Noises Off meets Casablanca, a theatre farce with a real backbone about exploring the unresolved. With a lot of gags based around bad writing and even worse acting, the humour is often quite broad, but writer Sarah Ruhl has moments of quick, knowing wit and ideas, batted playfully between the couple, that run deep.

Robert Innes Hopkins must have had some fun for this one, designing multiple sets within the set, both front-of-house and behind the curtains. The first set, a luxe 1930s apartment, slowly builds around the cast over the weeks of rehearsal before opening night. The second main set is “His” flat, and, conveniently for Innes Hopkins, the director (Rolf Saxon) decides, upon visiting “Him” in his flat, that he’d like to draw direct inspiration for the set of the second play. So we close on “His” flat and open on one that looks suspiciously similar, down to the stain on the bedsheet, as “She” points out.

There’s very little that’s realistic about this story, but then realism is unlikely Ruhl’s aim, what with the cast breaking into song in the middle of a very tense show-down, and the heavy-handed foreshadowing throughout in which actors within the plays-within-the-play then take on the same role in the “real world”. But in her unshackling from realism, Ruhl hits on some truths. It’s playful but sincerely meditative.