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Two actors rekindle an old passion while playing ex-lovers in a dreadful play, then see it fizzle out in an even worse one. That’s the premise of American writer Sarah Ruhl’s amusing but lightweight romantic backstage comedy. Bafflingly, it was a big hit in New York in 2014, but Blanche McIntyre’s production here is entertaining enough, despite an almost complete lack of sexual chemistry between the leads, MyAnna Buring and Patrick Kennedy.
In keeping with the play’s light mockery of theatrical tropes and cliches, their characters are identified only as She and He. The twist is that their central relationship is played (relatively) straight while everything around it – the hamminess of co-stars, the reactions of jilted lovers, the awfulness of the material they’re performing – is cartoonishly over the top.
There are also a couple of grandstanding speeches designed to showcase the writer’s cleverness but entirely untrue to the characters speaking them. The first is a declaration that theatre is better than film “because it’s less like masturbation”. The other explores why good actors can have sex with bad actors, but good painters can’t have sex with bad painters. I’m not sure the second thesis holds true, but both are at least provokingly funny.
The show opens with Buring’s character arriving at her first audition in years, marriage to an investment banker and the birth of their daughter, now a teenager, having reduced her acting career to the occasional commercial. There are easy laughs wrung from her lack of preparedness, the awkwardness of kissing a young, gay stand-in (James Phoon) for her leading man, and the schmoozy uxoriousness of the director (Rolf Saxon) who leaves everything to the actors’ inspiration.
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The show, improbably, is a revival in Newhaven of a ridiculous, mannered 1930s melodrama with songs about a society woman miraculously cured of a terminal illness by an ex-lover who then runs off with her daughter. The second play-within-a play is the Detroit premiere of queasily doomed romance between a prostitute and an IRA man in 70s New York, written by Saxon’s director. There’s an undercurrent of Manhattan snobbery here that doubtless played well off-Broadway, palliated by gags Ruhl makes about her home state, Illinois.
Anyway, in scene two Buring’s character’s actual co-star in the first play appears and, uh-oh, it’s the guy she had a fiery fling with when they were young, poor actors starting out, which ended acrimoniously. He never married or had kids and is now shacked up in a slovenly apartment with a supposedly saintly, younger schoolteacher. Their first stage kiss is awkward. Their fourth or fifth is also awkward, but for different reasons. Trapped in a doomed production, will they succumb to temptation and destroy their offstage lives? Take a wild guess.
On a basic level, this works as a spoof about the supposed sexual flightiness of actors. (John Gielgud, asked if he thought Hamlet and Ophelia had intercourse, allegedly replied: “By the third week of the tour, in my experience.” Disclaimer: this is an apocryphal story with many variations.) Buring’s character demonstrates osculatory technique on a female costar (Jill Winternitz) whose scene-stealing walk away afterwards suggests she’s had her internal organs and preferences rearranged by the experience.
The way drama distils and magnifies human behaviour is also referenced, sort-of. The wronged banker and teacher start acting like stagey caricatures when confronting their other halves, in a scene that concludes absurdly in a four-part rendition of Some Enchanted Evening.
There’s an interesting idea here, I think, about how we use actors as proxies to explore how life should be lived. But it gets stomped on by the galumphing comic business, which includes toppling pot-plants, onstage injuries and misfiring props, and the knowing staginess of it all. As is usual at Hampstead the first-night audience was jam-packed with actors who hootingly lapped up all the in-jokes: I’m not sure a general crowd will be quite so indulgent.
Buring is spirited and distinctive throughout, even when got-up in fishnets and a scarlet bra in the second act. Kennedy is amusingly vain as her lover and co-star, though there’s no real character there: perhaps that’s the point. Ruhl has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and once for a Tony Award but not, unsurprisingly, for this play.
To 13 June, hampsteadtheatre.com.
