Neil LaBute’s 2001 play, The Shape of Things, is one of these plays that has found its way into our cultural zeitgeist. Beginning its life at the Almeida in a production directed by LaBute and starring Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd, and later finding a second existence as a movie with the same cast, it’s a play that a good proportion of the audience will be familiar with in some form.
Art student Evelyn meets geeky Adam and almost immediately sets about shaping him – encouraging him to work out, dress better, take care of himself. But then it starts to get strange and weird as art and obsession become the driving forces within a relationship. The play explores the extraordinary lengths we’ll go to for love – and for art. It’s a highly unusual and gripping play, funny and tragic, and in my opinion, a modern classic.
Like most directors, I do a great deal of work on the play before the read-through. I was congratulating myself as I opened the script and helped myself to a doughnut, thinking, “You’ve really done your homework on this one, Sam.” And then we started chipping away at LaBute’s text and I realised that I hadn’t even begun. There was so much more in this play than I’d realised. It’s so much richer than I’d realised. And the more we work on it, the more we discover.
Rachel Wiesz and Paul Rudd in the film of The Shape of Things.
References to religion permeate the text. References to the Book of Genesis and the life of Christ. The play begins with Evelyn tempting Adam in front of a statue of a god and Adam later comments on having got thirty-three stitches for a wound. The play could be read as an allegory for the fall of Man and the redemption of original sin by Jesus Christ. It’s all in there, without a doubt.
And while it’s easy to view the play’s moral universe in a simplistic way, really there aren’t any good guys or bad guys (or girls). To paraphrase the playwright, The Shape of Things is about essentially good people who do some very bad things. Everyone gets their hands dirty. And in the language of the play, the whole concept of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is entirely subjective anyway. It really all depends on your point of view.
It’s a play about art. The central character is an artist, and her somewhat questionable actions, taken in the name of art, drive the plot. Some of LaBute’s finest writing is in this play, and much of it involves his thoughts about what art actually is, what’s it’s for, and how far we can go in the name of art. When does something stop being art and become something else, something harmful? Again, subjectivity comes into play here. If I say that something is art, and you say it isn’t, which of us is right? Evelyn would say that we both are.
It’s a play about people. Two men and two women meet, fall in love, fight, and tear each other apart. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it dances between these two polar opposites – often in the same sentence. It’s always powerful.
And it’s also a play about sex. I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed so much in a rehearsal room, or when I’ve been in any room where everyone talked about sex quite so much. The language of the play is full of sexual imagery, it drips with it, and it’s infected our rehearsals. Our quiet, well-mannered performers routinely turn the air blue with the kind of statements that would make a sailor blush. I’ve been tweeting quotes from the rehearsal room (#TheShapeOfThings #rehearsalquotes), but some of what’s been said is too explicit fo social media. In the world of The Shape of Things, people routinely confuse love and sex, mixing the two, calling them by the wrong name, mistaking them for each other. The characters are driven by the most primal of urges: sex, jealousy, anger, greed, lust for power. It might be a comedy about American students, but there’s definite thematic overlap with Jacobean melodrama.
More than anything, it’s a play about surfaces. Our obsession with, well, the shape of things: how we look, the judging of books by their cover, our cultural tendency to value people and objects based solely on how attractive they are, on how attractive we are told that they are or should be – and the consequences of this superficiality.
I can’t wait to see people’s responses and hear some of the conversations that occur as a result of the production. The conclusion is pretty shattering and I can’t wait to sit in the audience and listen to people’s reactions when the penny drops. I expect gasps and some mutterings. I wonder if anyone will speak out, or even walk out? I certainly hope so. I think that’s what Evelyn would want.
Main image shows Samuel Miller in rehearsals.
Samuel Miller’s revival of The Shape of Things is at the Arcola Theatre from 27th November – 21st December 2013.
