A dog’s dinner of a show
Stage Kiss (out of 4) By Sarah Ruhl, directed by Anita Rochon. Until Sept. 1 at the Royal George Theatre, 85 Queen St., Niagara-on-the-Lake. shawfest.com or 1-800-511-7429
The Last Kiss is 1930s melodrama about a dying married woman who takes up again
with her long-lost lover. I Loved You Before I Killed You, or: Blur
ry is a contemporary thriller about a doomed affair between an IRA man and a Brooklyn prostitute.
Both of these plays are very bad and neither really exist.
They are a key cog in the comic motor of Sarah Ruhl’s backstage farce Stage Kiss, in which two former lovers reconnect when they are cast in The Last
Kiss, and find their real lives blurring into its over-the-top fiction.
Ruhl’s play is far from perfect and a complex beast, but a production of it needs to stand in positive, ironic contrast to the purposeful badness of its playswithin-a-play. This is sadly not the case with Anita Rochon’s flat staging for the Shaw Festival.
Something feels awry from the first scene, in which Fiona Byrne’s She bumbles her way through an audition and leaves feeling she’s completely botched it, though the Director (Neil Barclay) and his assistant (Jeff Meadows) agree she wasn’t half bad.
We need to develop a connection with She, warts and all, in this scene, but the tone is off. Byrne plays hard into the comedy while Barclay’s performance is strangely blank and Meadows’ cliché-camp. What’s happening is a combination of cringeworthy humour, character development and thematic exposition, but a path is not forged for the audience through these layers.
In the following scene, rehearsals of The Last Kiss get underway and She comes face to face with He (Martin Happer), the scruffy man-boy in a concert T-shirt she hasn’t seen for 20 years. They play their response to this reconnection with a lot of heart and their renewing relationship becomes an audience anchor. A scene where they lean on the proscenium arch and start to rediscover what they saw in each other is a highlight.
But what does Rochon intend us to make of the dog’s dinner of a show they’ve signed on to; in- deed, what does Ruhl? Following the farce format, things start to go more and more wrong, but the director remains oblivious and all the other characters just soldier on. Byrne and Happer play the developing intimacy between She and He for emotional truth and it’s effective, but the dials don’t dial up high enough on the hijinks going on around them.
Given this unclear setup, the collapsing of worlds into each other in the second act, rather than being funny and pleasingly complex, was for me just plain confusing.
It is only at the moment where She hits the proverbial wall and has to walk away from all the metatheatrical madness that things become as hilarious as they are clearly intended to be, and there is credible warmth to final scenes between She and her husband (Sanjay Talwar) and daughter (Sarena Parmar), and between She and He.
Reviews of past productions describe it as goofy and charming, and it is these qualities that are perhaps most missing from this one: some kind of acknowledgement that this is all absurd but what the heck, we’re doing it anyway. There are kisses aplenty, but not nearly enough laughs.