They’re all masters of the art of the short story, and they all wrote a story called The Kiss. Realising this, director Susanna Dowling had the inspired idea to put their four stories on stage, word for word.

Maupassant looks at sexual power and the politics inherent in relations between women and men.

Chopin deals with deception and the choice between love and money.

Chekhov shows how the imagination can take a single moment of reality and build it into a fantasy that becomes more important than the original.

And Goldsworthy takes a kiss and turns it into an aching portrayal of Australian teenage bravado gone horribly wrong.

Eschewing the traditional hack-job of literary adaptation by using the complete text of each story, The Kiss steps out into a new form of theatrical storytelling.