“It’s fun, it’s frivolous, it’s a perfect Friday night tonic on a rainy night in Newtown.”
Julia Newbould
4 Stars
Venue: New Theatre
Sydney (Newtown)
Dates: Until 11th April 2026
Stage Kiss begins with an actress (Emma Delle-Vedove) auditioning for a role in a 1930s-style romantic comedy. She’s late to the audition, she doesn’t know what the play’s about, and she finds out she also needs to sing acapella.
Director Alice Livingstone carries the screwball nature of this scene throughout the play, and it’s this energy which makes it such a delight for the audience.
It’s a bright and witty comedy, and Delle-Vedove is perfectly cast as the actress in the centre of the play within a play.
The highlight of her audition is her stage kiss with the awkward stand-in actor, played by the versatile Frank Shanahan. There are several kisses and eventually it’s too awkward even for the director (Nicholas Papademetriou) to watch. She is told to improvise and so she auditions kissing her own fist.
Winning the role in the play, she is then unknowingly cast opposite her first love played by Jason Spindlow. This is Spindlow’s first performance at the New Theatre and he acquits himself well, matching the energy of Delle-Vedove in each iteration of their characters.
Papademetriou is clearly having fun playing the director. His character has a special connection with the audience, taking a seat in the front row to direct the play, and sharing his feelings about the actors through facial expressions.
There’s a fun vibe with the cast as they compete to see who can ham it up the most. My vote is for Shanahan who shines in each of his multiple characters – from the butler (with an awkward gait) to the pimp, to the understudy. His comedic timing allows him to evoke laughter with a mere turn of his head, funny walk, or the way he contorts his face when he steps in for the stage kiss.
Lynden Jones* as the husband, has a memorable dying scene, which I think he has modelled on an old Louie the Fly Mortein commercial. It was just missing a little leg jerk.
Designer Merle Leuschner must be congratulated for her clever set. It starts off as a fairly bare audition room, turns into a fancy New York apartment (which at one point reverses so we are behind the action), and finally becomes a cheap apartment which then doubles as a second stage.
It’s a play in two halves. The first half is the play itself and the second half deals with the fallout from the kiss.
American playwright Sarah Ruhl wrote Stage Kiss in 2011. Inspired by her great love for the 1930s, she wondered whether the heightened language used to describe love in those days was any more fake than contemporary expressions of love. This, combined with Ruhl’s fascination with the stage kiss and the idea that most plays will have a kiss in them, and what indeed is the stage kiss – is the basis of the drama. When two actors are kissing, is it as actors or is it as a person kissing a person?
Stage Kiss is not only about the kiss on stage – it’s what can happen when actors kissing turn into one person kissing another person.
It’s fun, it’s frivolous, it’s a perfect Friday night tonic on a rainy night in Newtown.
*Lynden Jones is the publisher of TheatreNow.
Photos by Bob Seary
Julia Newbould, Theatre Now
Four kisses
