The Shape of Things
Location: Drama Barn
Date: 1st February
Rating: * * * *
Starring: Lauren Clancy, Geoff Gedroyc, Lucy Whitby
I have to admit, I did not have high expectations of this week’s Drama Barn play, a production of Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. The knowledge that it centred around a nerdy student whose girlfriend makes him over into a ‘cool’ guy, and that it was made into a Hollywood film starring Rachel Weisz, invoked awful visions of a cross-between a staged version of a teen movie, with all the cringing stereotypes and cheap sexual gags to go with it, and Pygmalion. I was proved totally wrong. The central question asked by the play is how far can art go before it crosses a moral line? This question is tested to its limit, with unnerving results.
The floors and walls of the Drama Barn were painted in dazzling white and three pieces of installation art were placed on stage. This scenery provided the setting for the play’s opening scene in which Adam, an awkward English Literature student meets Evelyn, a wilful and pretty sculptress. The clean whiteness of the set seemed more and more apt as the play progressed: it began to feel like a laboratory in which Adam’s imperfections were scrutinised and dealt with by Evelyn. Indeed, perhaps the height of Evelyn’s control over Adam’s physical appearance comes when she takes him to a plastic surgeon to have a nose job.
Geoff Gedroyc, who plays Adam, was especially well cast, manipulating his imposing physical stature to great effect. He was an initially cumbersome presence on stage but as his transformation progressed, so did his charisma and poise. Even so, we were constantly aware that Evelyn (Lucy Whitby), unrelentingly confident and never missing a beat, was subtly preying on him. Whitby exuded an enigmatic sense of control which meant that the play’s conclusion seemed disturbing yet somehow inevitable.
Producer
Ollie Tilney played Phil