Theatre – The Mistress Contract

The Mistress Contract by Abi Morgan

The audience sits straight through for 85 minutes witnessing a series of conversations, spanning 30 years, between two nameless characters. This may not sound like a play that you should be rushing to but writer, Abi Morgan, who wrote the screenplays for Shame and The Iron Lady, has delivered a thought provoking study about the complexities of relationships.

A divorced woman and married man, who knew each other from college, meet 20 years later in a house in the Californian desert. They are having an affair but this affair is one where the woman has drawn up a contract – a mistress contract. It’s a framework which in many ways is similar to a marriage except they don’t live together all of the time. She also decides that she wants to tape their time together to have it as a record.

What follows is a series of scenes, beginning in 1981 and ending in 2010, which are measured out by the number of tape recordings arranged on the floor. Sex, Lies and Videotape minus the video? The unravelling experiment in The Mistress Contract illustrates that actually an affair becomes the same as a marriage – this is the main message of the play. The two characters, wonderfully acted by Danny Webb and Saskia Reeves, ultimately have the same concerns and fears as if they were married to each other. She is both jealous and insecure when discussing his wife and he exhibits the same emotions upon discovering that a 25 year old has made sexual advances towards his mistress. In theory with an affair it’s easier to walk away but the play challenges this doctrine and actually shows the characters becoming more intertwined and dependent on each other as time progresses.

It’s a tough brief for only two actors to hold the stage for 85 minutes but both Webb and Reeves rise to the challenge. The first 10 minutes is quite disjointed – where is it all going – but then the audience becomes intrigued in the experiment and the clever transformation of the aging actors over 30 years. There is both humour in the dialogue and the set. A vibrator makes an appearance and then you make the connection with all the cacti acting as phallic symbols. There’s also wonderful sexual symbolism in the repeated references to needing irrigation in the “desert masquerading as a garden”.

It’s reassuring that at the end, instead of being faced with a brittle feeling of emptiness, the audience is convinced about the amount of love between he and she. The experiment of the mistress contract has actually succeeded in demonstrating a reworking of relationships. Go see for yourself – www.royalcourttheatre.com