The Kiss

Overview

A world-weary aunt cautions her young niece on the power and misuse of her currently profligate shows of affection. A young man letting off steam on a tropical Darwin night holds his best friend's life in his hands. A nobleman's polite courtship of a maiden is upset when a bold ruffian swings through the doors and sweeps her into his arms. A quiet and round-shouldered Russian soldier discovers a world of obsessive fantasy after experiencing his first, accidental moment of intimacy with a woman.

Each of these is a short story with the title of The Kiss, written by Guy de Maupassant in 1882, Kate Chopin in 1894, Anton Chekov in 1887 or Peter Goldsworthy in 1999. With its sweet, flirtatious and emotionally charged connotations, the kiss is a subject that can pull a theatre audience close for hours, and Belvoir's The Kiss does for more than two.

Director Susanna Dowling has preserved the pieces' original prose, which the performers recite verbatim as they take on its characters (sometimes, with intended farce, more than one in each scene) or stand back as detached narrators. The approach allows the poetry and distinct styles of the four writers to be observed, making this a celebration of authorial idiosyncrasy and bringing a spark that helps sustain the performance. If anything, the reading is a little too flat, with none of the flights of irony or licences with subtext that so distinguish I Only Came to Use the Phone, a concurrent production using the same rare tack.

It's also not an ideal curation; you're looking for meaning in the divergences of these texts and their interpretations, but three of the four bear a similar tone and setting (late 19th-century parlour comedy), while Goldsworthy's is wildly different (modern rural Australian drama). Still, the four actors (Catherine Davies, Rita Kalnejais, Yalin Ozucelik and Steve Rodgers) put in strong performances imbibed with their own charms, and although you do start to feel its two-plus hours of narration, this is consistently fun to watch.