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by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Anita Rochon

Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 25-September 1, 2018

She: “When I kissed you just now did it feel like an actor kissing an actor or a person kissing a person?”

Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss is a play that is unworthy of being staged at the Shaw Festival.  The new Shaw mandate under Artistic Director Tim Carroll states, “Inspired by the spirit of George Bernard Shaw, the Shaw Festival creates unforgettable theatrical encounters in any way we want”.  Stage Kiss from 2011, however, is neither inspired by the spirit of Shaw nor creates an unforgettable theatrical encounter.  Stage Kiss is a lowbrow effort that tries unsuccessfully to be a satire of theatre, a romcom and a metatheatrical puzzle all at once.  The standard of acting is at the Festival’s usual high calibre but the material for actors who have played in Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw and Tennessee Williams, is distinctly below the level of their talent.

The premise of Stage Kiss is that director Adrian Schwalbach (Neil Barclay) plans to revive a (fictional) melodrama from 1932 that flopped on Broadway.  In it a married woman Ada is given one month to live and wants to say goodbye to Johnny, the man who was her first love.  The problem is that seeing him again not only rekindles their love but somehow cures her of her illness so that she and he want to throw off their ties and be together again. 

Act 1 of Ruhl’s play shows us the audition of a character known only as She (Fiona Byrne) for the role of Ada and her surprise at realizing that she has been cast opposite her ex-lover known only as He (Martin Happer).  Thus ex-lovers have been cast as ex-lovers.  Like Ada in the play-within-a-play, She is married with a teenaged daughter.  As the production heads from rehearsals to opening night, He and She rekindle their romance just as their characters do. 

At the end of Act 1 there would appear to be nothing left for Ruhl to do.  Through her contrived parallels, she has shown how life can imitate art and how playing at love can lead to real love. 

Unfortunately, Ruhl has written an Act 2.  There it becomes painfully evident that Ruhl really does have nothing else to say.  Schwalbach has written his own play and wants He and She to star in it.  They need the money so they do.  The conclusion of Ruhl’s play reveals how Schwalbach’s play has come into being and why he has cast He and She as the leads and it is so improbable that you feel angry that Ruhl has wasted your time with such an imbecilic plot.  Act 2 destroys whatever goodwill you felt toward the play after Act 1, and you realize that Ruhl’s Act 2 is there primarily to hit the audience repeatedly over the head with the illusion-reality paradox that was already clear in Act 1.  Besides this, Ruhl, though a 21st-century female playwright, has given the play a conclusion that strongly upholds conservative values.

What pleasure there is in Stage Kiss lies entirely in Act 1.  Its satire of the theatre is quite funny and the progress of He and She from animosity to love is well depicted.  Fiona Byrne is a delight from the beginning.  Her character She is throwing herself back into acting after a ten-year hiatus and tries to project confidence through the very effort that takes reveals her insecurities.  Martin Happer plays He with an underlying cynicism as if everything has gone wrong in his life.  Together Byrne and Happer generate a strong interpersonal chemistry, whether it is antagonism or romance, even when they do not speak.  That’s what makes Ruhl’s little spotlit monologues for both where they express their feelings so unnecessary.  If the parts are well acted, we know what the two are feeling.

Ruhl’s strange focus on the stage kiss itself is annoyingly adolescent.  It’s the same as when non-actors wonder if actors in movie sex scenes have feelings for each other.  In Stage Kiss Ruhl is taking the point of view of an ignorant non-theatre-goer who doesn’t realize that acting involves technique and timing not raw emotion.

Neil Barclay is very funny as the director Adrian Schwalbach, a director who is so laid-back that he appears to have no vision of the play or of the characters that he wants to bring out.  Barclay’s character seems blissfully unaware that he has a job to do and decisions to make and is quite happy to go along with whatever his actors decide to do even when they ask for specific direction.

Jeff Meadows plays the actor Kevin, whom we gather is somehow Schwalbach’s protégé, though whether their relation is more than that director Anita Rochon has not decided to indicate.  Kevin is the stereotype of the air-headed gay actor devoid of talent who really should return to waiting on tables. 

His presence in the play is a problem because Ruhl is willing to portray the straight romance of He and She as rich and complex but is happy to reach for a cliché when portraying a gay character.  Worse than that, Ruhl thinks it is especially funny that Kevin, because he is gay, cannot kiss a woman naturally.  This is when her use of a cliché becomes insulting.  Many gay actors say that they hesitated to come out because they thought audiences would no longer accept them in straight roles.  Ruhl apparently thinks so too and therefore makes Kevin’s grotesque approach to kissing a woman a source of humour.  This feeds into the naive view her play purveys that acting derives from feeling not technique.

The other three actors in the cast have very little to do.  Rong Fu as Laurie, the girlfriend of He, has only one big scene of anger in Act 2 (well performed) and nothing else.  Serena Parmar plays She’s daughter as an annoyingly loud and impudent teenager.  Sanjay Talwar plays the Husband in the 1932 play and later She’s real husband Harrison.  At least, Talwar is given the chance to contrast the comically bad acting of the husband in the play-with-a-play with Harrison earnestness and compassion.

There are so many great plays out there from the Shaw Festival’s original mandate and its expanded mandate that it is incomprehensible why the Festival should to stage so slight a work.  The ultimate play dealing with actors in love who may or may not be playing a role in their relationship is The Guardsman (1910) by Ferenc Molnár, that was staged by the Stratford Festival in 1977 and by Soulpepper in 2009, but never by the Shaw.  Since it is 2018, the Shaw could have staged a centenary revival of Pirandello’s play The Rules of the Game (1918), staged at Stratford in 1991,  in which a married man whose wife is having an affair manipulates the emotions of his wife and her lover to a tragic conclusion.  Here game-playing easily substitutes for the metaphor of acting.

Both of these plays offer greater challenges for actors and directors and both treat the theme of illusion versus reality in much subtler ways than Ruhl’s play that has to spell out its theme for us as if she regarded her audience as dullards.  After seeing Stage Kiss, one worries that in casting off the Shaw’s expanded mandate, Tim Carroll has also cast off substantial, more significant plays as well.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Martin Happer as He and Fiona Byrne as She; Fiona Byrne as She and Martin Happer as He. ©2018 David Cooper.   

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.