ajhlovestheatre

STAGE KISS

by Sarah Ruhl 

directed by Blanche McIntyre

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 13 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval 

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2026/stage-kiss/

Sarah Ruhl’s 2011 comedy, highly theatrical in setting and execution, is a slippery but ultimately rewarding thing. It’s a playfully meta look at the tension between ‘real life’ and the artificiality of the theatre, and what happens when those things get mixed up. 

Stage Kiss begins with an audition where an actress, named in the programme as simply She, performed with a captivating mix of goofiness and vulnerability by Myanna Buring, is auditioning with a director (Rolf Saxon, sublimely pompous) for an upcoming production. She thinks she’s flunked it but in the next scene she’s into rehearsals; a spoke in the wheel is that her co-star is an ex-lover, He (Patrick Kennedy). Ruhl’s text gives only the sketchiest of details of their previous relationship, interspersed with chunks of the truly heinous romantic comedy that they’re trying to rehearse, but it’s clear it did not end well.

The first half is a little mystifying, not helped by an unusually low energy staging by Blanche McIntyre, but it’s watchable. The short scenes swing between tiffs in rehearsal, snatched conversations in breaks then finally the performance itself. It’s fluffy and fun but the problem with sending up awful theatre is that, as an audience member, you’re still sat there being made to watch something that just isn’t very good, so the joke wears a little thin. Having He and She comment amongst themselves on the quality of the show they’re stuck in doesn’t quite let everyone off the hook, and by the interval the overall impression is of watching a sub par American Noises Off with songs, performed by actors who are better than their material.

Stick with it though, as the markedly different second half is where the real meat both of Ruhl’s script and McIntyre’s production is, and it’s pretty terrific. Since seeing Stage Kiss, I’ve been wracking my brains to think of another play since Thornton Wilder that delivers quite such a startling volte face between its two acts. If the first half seems frustratingly light, the second crackles even as it deliciously wrong-foots the audience, and Ruhl’s dialogue is pithy and sharp.

The latter half, simultaneously truthful and slightly surreal, is darkly funny as it explodes the frippery of act one, interrogating the chasm between the romantic and erotic expectations set up by art, and a reality that’s sometimes stark. If the first section could be shorter and sharper, the two acts cannot exist without each other. 

Stage Kiss also blows wide open any assumptions around the supposed glamour of working in the theatre. She and He are jobbing actors, not stars, concerned as much about money and their frequently difficult personal lives as they are about the integrity of their careers. The set by Robert Innes Hopkins undergoes a couple of transformations, from bare rehearsal room to medium-opulent stage design for the play-within-a-play, but is most effective in act two when it represents the bare-brick basics of the grim urban studio apartment where He dwells. 

Ruhl toys with her audience in the second half: when the curtain goes up on the squalid new location, Buring is still in the emerald gown worn ‘on stage’ in act one. She and He have resumed their relationship, despite having other commitments elsewhere, yet are still running their lines from the earlier play. So just how much of this are we supposed to take at face value? Cue the arrival of his girlfriend, a kind, slightly eccentric mid-westerner, and the emotional stakes are suddenly higher. Jill Winternitz delivers a tiny miracle in this role, creating a multi-layered, endearing character out of just a few moments stagetime. She’s followed by the actress’ husband and daughter, both furious, bewildered and played with glorious comic aplomb by Oliver Dimsdale and Toto Bruin respectively.

You know we’re in truly surreal territory when the warring parties are suddenly singing South Pacific’s ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ in beautiful four-part harmonies, before He and She are rehearsing another shocker of a play. This one’s an eye-wateringly pretentious avant garde ‘masterpiece’ written as well as staged by Saxon’s hilariously earnest director. This time though, the humour is surer in its targets: theatre people will get a kick out of observing He and She going through the obligatory fight call rehearsal while matter-of-factly discussing something totally unrelated to the mutual violence they’re perpetrating. Also, there’s a touching truth to the way Buring’s She re-evaluates her whole life while going through the motions of performance.

It could all feel a bit scattershot but amazingly it doesn’t. Kennedy is excellent as the actor capable of desire, empathy and cruelty all within seconds of each other, and he and Buring make a convincing central team. Stage Kiss takes the old adage that “all the world’s a stage” and runs with it; it sets Ruhl up as a sort of American Pirandello, and ultimately it’s a piece that, despite the shaky start, teases and haunts for a considerable time after you’ve left the theatre. A valuable rediscovery.