It’s terrible, the writing is superfluous, the acting is way over the top, and somehow the sexual chemistry is way too intense, like staring at the sun. Or that’s the fictional play staged by the cast of characters in Stage Kiss, New Theatre’s latest production. Luckily, Stage Kiss itself is wonderfully funny, with smart and layered writing by Sarah Ruhl that exposes all the ways love is an act and acting is a choice.
Stage Kiss review – quick links
A terrible play within a hilarious play
Stage Kiss opens with a woman stumbling down the audience stairs in a tizzy, late for her audition. The audition is for the role of Ada Wilcox, the star of a 1930s melodrama, who is diagnosed with an incurable disease but, through reuniting with her first love, is eventually cured. The unnamed actress auditioning, played marvellously by Emma Delle-Vedove, is frantic and insecure, telling the way-too-relaxed director (Nicholas Papademetriou) she hasn’t acted for over a decade.
Not long after landing the role, she discovers she’s been cast alongside her own first love, a similarly unnamed man (played by a sardonic Jason Spindlow). What follows is a romantically terse rehearsal process, as the leads of the play discover not only is the script for their play terrible, but their feelings for each other have not truly dissipated.
This may be a confusing explanation, given the core meta narrative of watching a play develop within a play, but it’s seamless to watch live. Director Alice Livingstone doesn’t overelaborate on these meta elements, and finds smart ways to blend the layers of the story.
The ‘actor’ for Ada Wilcox’s husband is the same actor (Lynden Jones) who plays the unnamed woman’s husband. Several other plotlines and characters are echoed across the real and fake production. The fictional director is also a key audience surrogate, sitting in the front row during rehearsals and seeming to realise how terrible the fake play is just as we do.
With lines like ‘Oh hooray! I haven’t had a hot dog since I was seven’, the fictional production is incredibly hammy and laughably bad. Stage Kiss is all the better for this, shying away from melodrama when looking at the small and real moments in the rehearsal room. Bad theatre, then, is made just as real as honest human connection.
Committed and comedic acting
Delle-Vedove is magnetic as the woman at the heart of the play, torn between the love she has for acting, her husband, and the man she cared for so many years ago. Her double performance – as the unnamed actress as well as the actress playing Ada – is masterful, with Ada’s heightened transatlantic accent and loose grasp of syntax akin to Catherine O’Hara’s best roles.
Papademetriou’s fictional director is also a clear highlight, perfectly vague and just slightly slimy in his complete lack of self-awareness. His insistence that the fictional play is ‘tonally slippery’ to justify not actually directing the actors is only made funnier because there are theatre people who are really like this. I’d imagine the cast and crew, in preparing for the play, discussed their rehearsal horror stories and found ways to infuse those stories into their characters.
Similarly, Frank Shanahan’s Kevin was funny because he was painfully real – look no further than the awkward moment he prepares to fake kiss Delle-Vedove’s character. Declaring he ‘studied Meisner’, he then shakes and contorts his face before going in for the kiss like a giddy prepubescent boy or overly-excited frog, tongue first. It’s a deviously funny skewering of pretentious actors, and an awkwardness that we have no choice but to laugh at.
The whole production is a classic farce, with those elements of slapstick and narrative doubling that create the best comedies. It’s also against this backdrop that Delle-Vedove and Spindlow are able to wring unexpected sweetness out of their rekindling, moving from bitter exes to infatuated lovers with a moving realism.
An unexpected second act
After the Stage Kiss expectedly devolves into a real kiss between the two leads, the second act takes a fascinating turn into the aftershocks of this betrayal. A lesser play would build towards that titular kiss, then jump into a resolution which is quick and too clean. Here, the second act is a curious and grounded follow-through of the messy emotional situation, and while it risks overstaying its welcome, an ending that is so stupid it’s endearing makes the payoff worthwhile.
The second act is the perfect time for the crew to shine too, with incredible accent work made possible by dialect coach Benjamin Purser. Without spoiling how this happens, the leads find themselves starring in another (worse) production, about a prostitute with a thick Brooklyn accent who falls in love with a member of the Irish Republican Army.
The accents are so incredibly strong and lines so awfully written that the actors look like they’re having their teeth pulled, the perfect evolution to the first act’s will-they won’t-they tension.
In a way, the second act’s escalation of this awkwardness feels like a karmic punishment for the characters, as the fictional productions they act in begin to reflect their regrets and terrible decisions in increasingly confronting ways.
We might find ourselves wishing for the fake plays to be over, but Stage Kiss itself sticks the landing like the best of kisses, not too long, smooth and sweet.
Stage Kiss plays at Newtown’s New Theatre until 11 April.
This article is published as part of ArtsHub’s Creative Journalism Fellowship, an initiative supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
