Review: STAGE KISS at Domain Theatre, Marion Cultural Centre

Reviewed by Eddy and Justene Knight, Thursday 31st March 2022.

Plays within plays give audiences a wonderful opportunity to laugh while glimpsing the secret world of actors. Think of Shakespeare's mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Michael Frayn's Noises Off. Sarah Ruhl's Stage Kiss, presented by Galleon Theatre Group, follows in this tradition and is just plain fun and filled with laugh-out-loud comic moments. It does get a bit confusing in the second half though, which isn't the fault of this production but rather of the play itself as it tries to do too many things and becomes over-complicated.

Director, Sally Putnam has pulled together a strong cast and the acting is very fine. From the very first scene, Anita Zamberlan Canala, as She, holds the stage and continues to fascinate us throughout the play. Her demonstration of the audition nerves suffered by an actor desperate to return to the stage, after an absence of many years, was perfect. In particular, the brittle veneer of self-confidence that shatters as she drops her bag, and her 'life' falls, out was painfully funny, as were her exasperated and increasingly steely comments to the director as the weeks go past and the rehearsals continue.

Adrian Heness, as the bumbling, gangly, and unfocussed director, gives us a perfect character study of a first-time director and then first-time playwright who is over-confident and brimming with enthusiasm yet doesn't yet know what he is doing. And then there is He, played by Andrew Clark, giving us a perfect rendition of a leading man's mix of laconic arrogance and charm. The characters of She and He also deliver to us the complication that any play requires, in that they were lovers long ago at the start of their acting careers and now, in this case of art imitating life, they have to play ex-lovers who still find each other very interesting.

The confluence of art and life is continued in the shape of Scott Battersby who is both the husband of She, the actor, and then, as a completely different person, her husband Harrison in the melodrama that they are rehearsing, and then play. Battersby moves between these roles with a strong characterisation that provides nuance to both husbands. Anthony Vawser slides across four roles woven in and out of each of the plays, but a particular favourite was his cameo of a perfect German-accented Freudian doctor delivering bad news. Grainne O'Connell as the daughter, both within the play and within the melodrama, brings to life the knowingness and vulnerability of youth. Finally, Samara Gambling plays both the girlfriend of He, and the best friend in the melodrama, where she most delightfully sweeps across the stage like a galleon in full sail.

Are you with me so far? To recap, we have three actors playing one role each; Director, She, and He, although the latter two also play roles in the melodrama, which is a pastiche of a 1930s sub-Noel Coward melodrama, complete with romantic songs, flowing costumes, plummy accents, exaggerated gestures, and overblown lines.

Then we have four other actors who each have numerous roles, both in supposed real life and within the melodrama. In the course of this very funny first act, which will undoubtedly improve with a bit more pace, the dying wife recovers under the influence of her ex-lover, to the chagrin of her stage husband, and, in real life, the ex-lovers, She and He, who have had to kiss on stage something over two hundred times, have fallen in love all over again. The highlight of the show for me was the wonderfully undercut schmaltziness of Zamberlan Canala singing the melodrama's big romantic duet number, as she dances around He, who can only lift one of his crutches to dance with her. Absolute magic.

The second act starts with the two actors in bed together, because She has left her husband and her teenage daughter and they are determined to continue joint acting careers.

I must confess that, from this point onwards, the whole thing started to fall apart for me. What, up to now, had been complicated, but amusing, now lurched towards confusing and obscure. Samara Gambling, as Laurie, the school-teacher partner of He, comes home to find them in bed together. The husband and daughter arrive, the school teacher feeds the daughter a sandwich, the Director bursts in and wants to direct the actors in a play he has written, where She gets to play a prostitute and He an IRA hitman who is also her lover. In this new play the Director becomes increasingly frantic and despotic, the stage kisses become rough and aggressive, Vawser, as Kevin, the actor from the first play, becomes a fight coach to help the actors with their movements, but later morphs into a pimp who turns up to shoot someone, but ends up shooting himself. Then the husband wants his wife to teach him how to act so that he can kiss her on a stage, and He bids them a fond farewell; twice.

I imagine the playwright was trying to make a comparison between the unreality of the schmaltzy romance of the thirties and the equal unreality of today's sleazy and gritty realistic dramas. It was all a little too much for me, though.

The acting, as I said, was excellent, as was pretty much every other aspect of the production, in particular, the costuming by Trisha Graham, with She requiring numerous outfits, all of which were in keeping both with her as an actor, and with the roles that she was supposedly playing. The set for the first act, I thought, could have been simplified, as the various set changes between very short scenes slowed the pace somewhat. It was more effective in the second act. As usual, with Galleon, the lighting by James Allenby was spot on.

I would recommend Stage Kiss to audiences who just want a good fun night out and are prepared to leave logic at the door.