“When I kissed you just now did it feel like an actor kissing an actor or a person kissing a person because I’ve kissed you so many times over the last few weeks I’m starting to not know the difference”

★★★★ The Times
★★★★ WhatsOnStage
★★★★ Time Out
★★★★ All That Dazzles
★★★★ The Arts Desk
★★★★ The Spy In The Stalls
★★★★ LondonTheatre1
★★★★ Plays International

Lauren and Humphrey; Elizabeth and Richard; Brad and Angelina. It’s famously hard for actors to keep romance under wraps after the director shouts ‘cut’. Fact and fiction are so easily blurred under the dazzling haze of the spotlights.

It’s the first day of rehearsal for long-forgotten melodrama, The Last Kiss. Enter – a plot twist. Art imitates life, as our two leading actors have an explosive romantic history of their own. With opening night approaching, a passionate affair may be waiting in the wings…

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl’s brilliant romantic comedy makes its UK premiere, following a critically acclaimed New York run in 2014. Stage Kiss is directed by Blanche McIntyre and is their second collaboration, following the successful Downstairs production Letters from Max in 2025. Blanche’s credits also include The Assembled Parties, Apex Predator and the record-breaking The Invention of Love.

‘Peppered with wry, funny commentary on the emotional antics of actors at work… the kind of rewardingly happy ending that reminds us of how the artifice of theater can stir real emotions not just for those who create it, but for those who attend it, too’
The New York Times

‘Sarah Ruhl delivers a brilliant comedy that aims for big laughs and hits its target… There’s nothing like it’
New York Post

‘Both wholly original and instantly recognizable to the audience. As a satire of theatre and theatricals, it’s right up there with Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys’
The New Yorker