The Shape Of Things
The Sunday Age
Sunday November 27, 2005
THEATRE REVIEW: The Shape of Things; WHERE: Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda. Tel: 9533 8083 WHEN: To December 17 TICKETS: $25/$15 ****
American writer Neil LaBute is probably best known as the writer and director of the 1998 movie In the Company of Men, based on his play, in which two suits - a square-jawed alpha male and his sad-sack beta mate - revenge themselves on women (or Woman) by toying with the affections of a handicapped co-worker. LaBute deals in life in what I guess we have to call the post-ethical world, where might is right and niceness looks much the same as weakness.In The Shape of the Things weakness and niceness is embodied by Adam (Brett Cousins), an English literature student at a small college, who first meets glamorous, self-possessed Evelyn (Kat Stewart) when she is about to deface a statue at the art gallery he is employed to guard. Evelyn is well out of Adam's league; he is podgy and bespectacled, a nail-biter, and with women he has just about no runs on the board at all. With the barest prodding from Evelyn he commences to hoist himself into the same attractiveness bracket: gym, contacts, new wardrobe, even plastic surgery.His friends Jenny (Kate Cole) and Phillip (Simon Wood) have mixed feelings about his transformation: Phillip, in particular - who appears to like having someone to whom he can feel superior (here, as elsewhere, LaBute is very sharp on the competitive antler-locking side of male friendship) - is threatened by Adam's move up the great chain of sexual being.It is clear early on that Evelyn is very interested in power: she is an alpha female, but you have to wait for the knockout denouement to find out what her agenda is. LaBute provides hints and red herrings along the way, as does director Tom Healey in this nifty production, but he is well ahead of the audience in his capacity to imagine a kind of cruelty so nerveless that it actually needs another term to describe it.Kat Stewart as Evelyn never puts a foot wrong: she retains her imperturbable cool from beginning to end. She is beyond villainy; she is a piece of work, and for all their talents she does make the others look coarse. Cousins settles into his role but, at the beginning at least, he overdoes the nerdiness. In the play as written you can see how Adam's dry wit keeps him from being a zero, but Cousins cranks up the aw-shucks nerviness. Simon Wood has the hardest work to do. LaBute has written him as a jock with a hair-trigger, who turns into a bully the moment anyone disagrees with him. As written, the part is slightly overwrought and Wood and Healey haven't toned it down. But as a whole the play and the production are both so compelling that the glitches barely make a dent.
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