By BRUCE DENNILL
The Agents / Directed by Toni Morkel / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
This show has been performed around the country, popular in all its incarnations, and there are several reasons why that has been and will continue to be the case. Practically speaking, it’s compact, with props that all fold up to less than the central third of the Theatre On The Square stage that it occupies. That’s an important detail when it comes to making original work festival-friendly and so easier to introduce to a wider range of audiences, but it is perhaps the least impactful facet of a brilliant package.
Director Toni Morkel is one of South Africa’s most respected physical theatre practitioners and has a four-decade career taking in every aspect of the theatre industry. She brings all that experience and its insights to her marshalling of a talented trio in The Agents. Kyla Davis, Roberto Pombo and Lisa Derryn Overy are (along with Morkel) all theatre administrators and theatre-makers as well as actors and improvisors, and this is reflected in understanding the effectiveness of the extraordinary tightness of their individual and collective performances, which allows the correspondingly detailed and high-paced writing to really pulsate and shimmy from scene to scene.
The set-up is deceptively simple: three characters, colleagues in a real estate firm, united in their view that the sale is everything and ethics can be smudged along the way, with each given centre stage in a developing scale of both the value of the properties considered and the challenges that come with investing in and owning them. It’s a clever, clear mechanism for unabashedly satirising money-focused greed and its related disdain for empathy, using a commission-driven industry in which the customers are people experiencing different stages of life that make them vulnerable in various ways as an effective filter.
Put simply, the outcome is screamingly funny. Snort- or cry-laughing is a likelihood rather than a possibility, and again, the intensity of the success of the formula is down to the combination of a number of different things. Davis’ wig, Pombo’s moustache and Overy’s hairclips all deserve their own separate paycheques, adding a kind of comedy crosshatching to the already fully defined personae they bring to the stage in a whirlwind of energy, ego, bluster and misplaced confidence. As with the actors, so with the characters: Brenda (Davis), Venter (Pombo) and Linda (Overy) have rehearsed spiels delivered with such conviction that they believe their own words, however transparently dubious they are. The fact that the protagonists are effectively characters acting out scripts they continuously rewrite adds a philosophical layer to proceedings, but what stays in the mind – and in tired cheek and belly muscles – is the comedy.
The script crams scores of gags and punchlines into a 70-minute running time, with laughs being inspired by wordplay, facial expressions, choreography, physical comedy and the sort of manic commitment to the bits that makes, for instance, Basil Fawlty’s outrage at some tiny affront so enduringly hilarious in Fawlty Towers. Davis gives Brenda outrageous, overbearing Karen energy; Pombo’s Venter fills in every space where expertise or empathy should be with blowhard prattling; and Overy’s downtrodden Linda is a sidesplitting suggestion of what Steve Buscemi playing the goofiest (female) nerd in Mean Girls might look like.
There are occasional passages where the script goes past delicious dark humour to edgy territory that may offend more delicate sensibilities, but there is barely a moment from beginning to end in which both the entertainment value and the astute acumen of the piece is not powerfully evident. If an audience is to be reminded that humanity can be awful, especially when refusing to take responsibility for the chaos we cause when we put avarice ahead of compassion, making them laugh until tears run down their faces is the best way to do it.