The Agreement

The ‘agreement’ of the title is the almost always unspoken understanding of the hierarchy that underlies a friendship.  As in ‘You’re the pretty one, but I’m the smart one’, or it’s Master and Apprentice, Teacher and Pupil, Mentor and Mentee.  Forget an association of equals!  ‘Unspoken’ because to spell it out would be just too stark or cruel.  But not all parties to these arrangements are necessarily aware of them… This turns out to be the state of play between Mathilda (Emma Cox) – the ‘smart one’ – and Cindy (Ciume Lochner) – the ‘pretty one’.  That is, until they’re on the way to a friend’s wedding in Broken Hill and their bus breaks down.  While they wait and wait in the heat for their driver, gnomic Bob (Alec Gilbert) to fix the bus, the women review their situation.  Or Mathilda does because not only is Cindy violating the agreement, she seems unaware of it. 

What exacerbates Mathilda’s distress is that her career appears to be on the skids, if not over, while Cindy’s is taking off.  Mathilda is alone while Cindy has at least two men who love her.  Even worse, the men are not drawn to Cindy entirely because she is ‘pretty’.  Unbeknown to Mathilda – or unbeknown prior to this enforced stop in ‘the middle of nowhere’ – Cindy has been reading books, listening to highbrow radio, generally learning all kinds of things and acquiring quite a wide frame of reference so that she might even be smarter than smart Mathilda.

Speaking of ‘pretty’, casting is somewhat of a distraction.  Mathilda is supposedly, according the Director’s Notes, ‘dumpy’, and she refers to herself as overweight and expresses some jealously of Cindy’s legs and figure in her cute playsuit.  Ms Cox, however, is in fact petite and rather pretty herself.  Dialogue and acting can’t entirely overcome appearance – especially in the La Mama Courthouse where the actors are so close.

Here is a play that presents a somewhat static situation in which we get to hear a great deal about the past – both women are in advertising – about various ad campaigns, bosses, friends and associates.  At frequent intervals, Bob the driver wanders onto the stage, holding perfectly clean engine parts, and making ‘profound’ statements, mostly quotations, about Life.  Mr Gilbert gives it all he’s got, but these interventions are just, well, silly.  The sentence ‘This bus has broken down’ is repeated several times just to make sure we understand it is a metaphor.  There is a lot of rapid-fire talk and advertising jokes and quotations and we must peer through it all to get at the real subject – i.e. ‘the (broken) agreement’.  Curiously, Mathilda attacks the issue, dismayed and angry, but self-absorbed Cindy takes almost to the end to engage with her friend to deny or explain or offer a defence.  There’s no counter-attack.  Mathilda might as well be talking to herself – if she isn’t talking directly to the audience - so we don’t exactly get a debate, let alone dramatic conflict, on the subject.

Ian Cairncross’ set (and lighting?) is extremely simple but suggestive of ‘the middle of nowhere, but give that the ‘middle of nowhere’ is also a metaphor, the feel is perhaps too benign.

The concept of an ‘agreement’ between friends is an entirely worthwhile and true-to-life subject to ‘explore’, but Clare Mendes’ text and Elizabeth Walley’s direction rather hinder engagement.  Although Ms Mendes has four published novels to her credit as well as a number of radio plays, The Agreement is her first work for the stage.  The venture into a slightly different field has perhaps made her anxious and in trying to be ‘entertaining’ and funny, she has overwritten and overlaid the latent potential of the piece.

Michael Brindley