A Kiss - Review

A Kiss is a quick six-minute dip in the shared psyche of Kaitlin and her former lover, Kyle, who after three years of being separated, now find themselves in Kaitlin’s bedroom on a sun-drenched afternoon, in the air a question - will they kiss? Kaitlin’s work chooses microcosmic worlds to enlarge to a point where each thought, each intention, even each stage of an action is given the time to unfold, offering up intimate portraits of character. Paradoxically, greater insight comes from the momentary than something attempting to be more exhaustive. Such a brief account precludes detailed explanation but creates a closeness fed by imagination. She employs audio’s ability to create liminal spaces where fantastic worlds unfurl. This is the theatre of A Kiss, in which the story’s events are narrated by the interior voices of both Kaitlin and Kyle and buoyed by non-literal sound design. The effect is a kind of suspended consciousness, with a miasmic ability to undermine certainty, for how can any two people experience the same truth? Silence sits at the heart of the piece, the moment before the kiss and the moment directly after, when the implications of the kiss are unknown, highlighting through absence acute moments of uncertainty. A listener seeking resolution will not find it. What they will find is something much closer to reality, life as a palindrome formed from the colliding trajectories that are love, lust, attraction and nostalgia. What seems to be a simple story shaped around a kiss gently teases out the nebulous nature of truth.