What if you could sculpt flesh and model human will? Neil LaBute’s smart and ever-so-slightly soulless drama brings the god-like delusions of the artist into the murky arena of sexual relationships. How? Through a makeover, of course.
Self-possessed student Evelyn (Lucy Marks) picks up shyly unstylish Adam (Andrew Nolan) while defacing a statue of God in the art gallery where he works. They start dating and she lures him into a programme of push-ups, new clothes and even a nose job. But does she love her boy in the gallery? This being vintage Labute, love – if there is such a thing – is a synthetic cocktail of vanity, sexual envy, dependency and power. ‘The Shape of Things’ zigzags nastily and amusingly between LaBute’s regular axis of two ill-matched couples. And it has plenty provocative insights about our callow culture of narcissism, litigation, lies and self-improvement.
I won’t reveal the deus ex machina of the final scene, but it’s a nifty idea to stage the Adam project where it starts and ends, in a gallery. The dark-tinted lines, delivered with especially suitable glassiness by Marks’s mysterious Evelyn, are less a window into the speaker’s soul and more
a black and convex reflection on everyone else. Self-fashioning is never out of fashion and ‘The Shape of Things’, which was premiered by the Almeida ten years ago with Rachel Weiss in Evelyn’s role seems, depressingly, even more pertinent now.
Admittedly, it’s a cartoon exposé – and sometimes Tom Attenborough’s quietly confident production lacks the energy and irony to make the most of LaBute’s hyperbolic sense of humour. But there’s good engaging work here, especially from Andrew Nolan as sweetly passive Adam and Katy Marks as Jenny, the most touching and well-rounded of the four characters, despite (or perhaps because) she has the least to say for herself.