The Kiss

Chris O'Rourke
5 hours ago
3 min read

Updated: 2 hours ago

Luke Griffin in The Kiss. Image, Amelia Stewart Keating

*****

There’s something in the water at Bewley's Café Theatre. That, or their ascendant star sign is in lunar retrograde signalling a particularly propitious moment. How else can you explain lightning striking the same place and in the same manner twice? The little theatre that could delivering back to back, five star productions. Stuart Roche’s tautly scripted, exquisitely performed and superbly directed one hander, Shard, followed by a tautly scripted, exquisitely performed and superbly directed one hander, The Kiss. A cracking revival of Jimmy Murphy’s monologue which Lee Coffey directs with sensitivity and grace. In which Luke Griffin is born to play a grieving man awaiting a court verdict after his partner is killed following a homophobic assault.

2015 proves a significant year. Marked, consciously or otherwise, by a Hophouse 13 display in a dimmed echo of a once thriving bar. Where an unsteady Eddie smuggles in a shoulder of vodka to top up his drink as he awaits the jury’s verdict. Aside from being the year The Kiss premiered at the much missed Theatre Upstairs, and when Hophouse 13 first came on the market, 2015 was also the year of the Marriage Equality Referendum. If time has tempered some of its facts, especially those around legal rights for same sex couples, the play remains painfully prescient. For the fact remains that homophobic assault is still a real and present danger.

Luke Griffin in The Kiss. Image, Amelia Stewart Keating

Murphy understands that the most powerful polemics are people. The flesh and blood of lived experience saying far more than activist rhetoric. Murphy’s determination to put character first paying huge dividends. The Kiss less a lecture so much as a personal encounter with the quotidian details of a life glazed with tragedy. Eddie’s Hinterland informed by our shared humanity. Direct address recounting having to move back home with his parents and a taxi job to pay them for the privilege, a life changing visit to Barcelona, his first encounter with lover Val and their plans and hopes similar to all who risk a life together, be they gay, straight or otherwise.

Structurally, the offstage courtroom not only supplies real time context, it highlights how life is shaped by things outside our control, be they assaults, scurrilous barristers, or verdicts that can never undo what was done. Tensions Murphy sensitively explores rather than sensationally exploits. Griffin's Eddie a man trying to hold it together rather than a victim falling apart. Never making a big display of pain but looking uncomfortable and embarrassed by it. Wrapped in self-blame Eddie endures his survival, living through the emptiness of going on when you can't go on. Talking calmly so you can't hear him scream. Each raised tone, each flicker of anger, each momentary pause landing like a hammer blow for not trying to emotionally bludgeon you. Instead, Griffin effortlessly breaks your heart. Coffey’s gentle direction, like a skilled gondolier, keeping the craft on its smooth, straight course with fleet, imperceptible course corrections.

Luke Griffin in The Kiss. Image, Amelia Stewart Keating

Retrospective narratives often make for poor plays. Especially those that don’t end so much as stop at the crucial moment. The tragedy of The Kiss lies not in will they or won't they be exonerated, but that the beating should never have happened in the first place. It's easy to forget that pre-referendum same sex, public displays of affection were seen as transgressive acts that could invite danger. If legally that danger is criminalised, the danger still remains. The Kiss offering a poignant reminder that we’ve still some distance to go before live and let live becomes a reality rather than empty last words. A first class script, excellently directed, with a beautifully judged performance, The Kiss packs a lifetime into a lunchtime.