The Shape Of Things. Park Theatre.

“It isn’t art if you don’t have something to say” yells writer Neil LaBute’s justifiably irate protagonist Adam towards the end of comedy drama The Shape of Things. LaBute seems to want to say something about the ethics of art and the morality responsibility of the artist in the play, here revived at the Park Theatre more than two decades after its first production at the Almeida. But so long does the writer take to get to the meat of the thing that the broadly comic first three-quarters of the show manages to drag. This leaves the final more reflective revelations to zip by at an almost unseemly pace. Twenty-years on one cannot help but feel there is less in this work than meets the eye.

Unworldly English Lit undergraduate Adam (Like Newton) supplements his student loans by working as a security guard at a small-town, conservative California art museum. Fine Art master’s student Evelyn (Amber Anderson in her professional stage debut) steps in front of one of the statues he guards with a spray can. She is intent on applying a fake penis to the figure’s fig-leaves. “I don’t like art that isn’t true” the gum-chewing antagonist says by way of explanation for crossing the line, before warning us she is “not going to step back”. She remains true to her word.

The odd couple begin a passionate relationship driven by Evelyn’s urge to give the credulous Adam an all-round physical and mental makeover. But just how honourable are the postgrad’s creative intentions and will she, like Dr Frankenstein, summon up a creature she cannot control? Space’s ‘90s rock hit Female of the Species plays as the show opens, delivering a none-too-subtle hint as to where this may be going. The Meteor’s song Psycho For Your Love gets a hearing too in this signpost heavy production. Adam’s jockish room-mate Phillip (Majid Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy) and girlfriend Jenny (Carla Harrison-Hodge) are there as so much collateral damage.

Newton is likeable and broadly believable as the geek who cannot quite believe his luck in snaring the hottest girl in college. He is a kind of blank canvas onto which Evelyn’s artistic flair, in the form of tinted contact lenses, nose-job, gym training, and Tommy Hilfiger outfits is unleashed. She records her progress in the form of videos of the couple’s lovemaking, certainly an unusual style of artist’s diary. Ultimately, of course, Adam’s transformation is a superficial one, an example of a poor conceptual artist’s obsession with how things look, their shape and form, rather than what they have to say. This boy’s makeover is a triumph of style over substance. One is tempted to make the same criticism of The Shape of Things as a whole, polished though the comedy is there is a temptation at the end to emit a weary ‘so what?’ Occasional references to Othello and Greek tragedy do not add much here.

LaBute makes Evelyn, here played with gauche menace by an excellent Anderson, a kind of blank canvas too. We know almost nothing, other than what she tells us, about her back-story or motivation. This leaves the audience to project our own interpretations onto her. She may be an amoral monster who believes the artist to be free of the moral responsibilities that apply to others, or she may be an avenging feminist angel whose objectification of Adam makes a valid artistic point.

Art sometimes needs to provoke, and LaBute’s two questionable references to the Holocaust in the script are mildly provocative. But portentous provocation needs an endgame. One is never sure here what point LaBute is trying to make, although the following exchange seems to sum it up – “you’re sick” says Adam, “but I’m nice-looking, which makes up for a lot” responds Eve. That may well be all there is to it.

Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy is on good form as Phillip, whose determination to marry his fiancée while scuba-diving sums up a kind of dumb Californian innocence. Harrison-Hodge’s Jenny is good too, as she finds herself disastrously attracted to the newly minted, fashion-clad Adam. Peter Butler’s set, a blank greyish picture frame in front of which the action takes place, evokes Evelyn’s ongoing artistic endeavour, but gives little feeling of the small-town American college zeitgeist.

Writer: Neil LaBute

Director: Nicky Allpress