Pain and pleasure in the sex war

10 April 2012

Any shrewd chap who finds his artist girl-friend has a video-camera in the bedroom to film the cut and thrust of their sexual action might well fear he was destined to end up as her artistic fodder.

But in The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute's absolutely chilling report from the sex war's frontline, where stratagems for sexual humiliation are planned, Adam, the shy chap concerned, takes the video-camera, so to speak, lying down. LaBute, the remarkable American movie director and playwright, whose film In The Company of Men showed a sexually unappealing woman exploited by two vengeful, pretend lovers, now returns to this theme. This time it's a man who's the victim of female guile, in the seductive shape of Rachel Weisz's Evelyn.

With Miss Weisz simmering on the scene it's no surprise the play's caught up in conventional student romancing. A misplaced kiss causes trouble and questions for two couples. But LaBute meticulously plans that the shocking, climactic revelations should cast dark light upon his apparently average people. Miss Weisz , dressed if not to kill at least to lay men at her feet, plays Evelyn a final-year art student in an American liberal arts college. Her character's the focus for LaBute's overpitched attack on the unscrupulousness of artists and modern society's fascination with surface rather than substance. Oscar Wilde's assertion that "insincerity and treachery somehow seem inseparable from the artistic temperament" is quoted, tested and found truthful.

The action is set in and around the college-campus, not that location matters in LaBute's own, curiously inept production. The Almeida's King's Cross venue now has an apron-stage that helps give a more intimate atmosphere. But Giles Cadle's fussy, irrelevant scene changes are accompanied by irritatingly long black-outs and Billy Corgan's rock songs, blasted out by the Smashing Pumpkins. Evelyn is first seen poised to vandalise a museum male nude, which she claims is false art. But falseness proves her own metier. When she meets Paul Rudd's awkward, nerdish Eng Lit student, Adam, in a corduroy jacket, she gathers him up for her own use.

A comedy of sexual manners begins. Evelyn changes Adam's clothes, hair and life. His nose is improved by domestic surgery, his body by weightlifting. Contact lenses replace his spectacles. The smitten fellow looks cute at last. His friends, Gretchen Mol's dimmish Jenny and Frederick Weller as her smarter fiancé, regard him as sexy at last. But in the play's cruel finale Evelyn reveals her motives for snaring Adam. He comes to seem of no more value than a freshlycreated art installation or a final-year art work.

To use Evelyn as an example of the artist's supposed tendency to be exploitative and mendacious is not persuasive, and her attempt to use Adam as if he were an artist's raw material overblown satirical jest. Paul Rudd's good looks and physical grace make him a strange choice to play Adam. He valiantly manages to look like an ugly, ungainly duckling transformed into a preening swan. Perhaps it's LaBute himself who persuaded him to underplay Adam's sense of fury and hurt. At least Rachel Weisz dynamically captures and conveys LaBute's sense of the destructive femme fatale. She begins as husky-voiced, endearing bohemian and ends up radiant with power, relishing power to cause pain.

The Shape Of Things

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