The tone is slippery, isn’t it? So says the director of the-play-within-the-play. He’s trying to avoid the director’s job of making decisions, but I felt the line wasn’t just satire, but rather an example of the text being self-referential.
When Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play was first presented in Sydney, I stayed away; the marketing had made it sound like some stupid sex comedy. When I finally saw it at New Theatre in 2025, I was more than pleasantly surprised. Yes, there were sex jokes (possibly too much of the one sex joke) but there was also a joyous profundity.
With Ruhl’s Stage Kiss I was expecting – hoping – for something similar: that the tone might be slippery.
Set in the world of the theatre, there’s wonderful humour. Much of it is parody of bad acting or of bad theatrical writing. In fact, there’s so much of this – like there was of the sex jokes in The Vibrator Play – I was hoping their very excess suggested this play was following what I had assumed to be the Ruhl method … and that soon a glorious profundity would manifest itself.
Someone critical of my approach to writing about theatre might say, that having seen the flowing life blood of the play, I wanted it to congeal.
(If it were to congeal, the clot would be something like this: the play is an interrogation into the relationship between Art and Life. While rehearsing a play, a terrible 1930’s melodrama, the protagonist reunites with her first love. Similarly, the character she is rehearsing reunites with her first love. Life, it seems, imitates Bad Art. In the second act, we get more of the same, except it’s a new-play-within-a-play, and this time it seems it’s more of a case of a Bad Life imitates Bad Art. The meta-play, Stage Kiss, follows in the grand tradition of warning against Art by using Art. Perhaps Cervantes started it with Don Quixote, telling the tale of the knight errant who tilts at windmills because the books he has read lead him to see them as giants. Austen picks up the baton with Northanger Abbey, in which her heroine – once again because of the books she’s read – sees monstrous gothic plots in the most mundane of circumstances. And pick a Fringe Festival anywhere on the planet, and there’s a good chance there’s a show in which a young actor outlines how they finally divested themselves of the nonsense they learnt from rom-coms or romance novels or similar rubbish. And, as well as the-plays-within-a-play structure, there’s another element of Stage Kiss that suggests Ruhl’s target is the spell of fiction: there’s a comically-heated-discussion about the concept of soul-mates. Now, the existence of soul-mates implies the existence of Fate, which more than implies that Life, rather than being a crazy bunch of stuff that happens, is actually a Narrative. The comically-heated-discussion in question considers Who it is who might be the author of such a meta-Narrative.
But, of course, all of the above is only for you if you’re the sort of person who likes your theatre to congeal.)
The flowing life blood of Stage Kiss is humour – and director Alice Livingstone’s production nails it. Livingstone has put together a top cast and elicits from them excellent comic performances.
Emma Delle-Vedove is hilarious as the bewildered protagonist. Jason Spindlow as her first love gives a beautifully funny portrayal of a kid-adult. Frank Shanahan as a cast member of the plays-within-a-play excels at that most tricky of tasks for a talented actor: employing your considerable skills to portray bad acting. Nicholas Papademetriou as the undecided director of the-plays-within-a-play is an utter delight.
Paul Gilchrist
Stage Kiss by Sarah Ruhl
At New Theatre until 11 April
Image by Bob Seary
Theatre Red 