Theatre
Michael Portillo - Adam and Evelyn
Published 07 June 2004
Theatre - Neil LaBute's sinister tale of a dork who turns into a hunk fails to seduce, writes Michael Portillo
The Shape of Things
New Ambassadors Theatre, London WC2
Evelyn is not the sort of girl you'd want to mess with. The first thing we see her do is step over the rope that has been set up in her Midwestern college-town art gallery to keep spectators at a safe distance from the sculptures, and advance upon one of the exhibits with a spray can of paint in her hand. She objects that a committee has ordered a fig leaf be superimposed over the statue's genitals, and she thinks that daubing it with a graffiti penis will strike a blow for art. How many warning signs does a guy need that such a woman should be kept at least at bargepole distance?
The trouble is that she is drop-dead gorgeous, and Adam, a student who is moonlighting as a security guard, is a geek. They look like Titania and Bottom from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. One word of flattery from her and he turns to putty in her hands; all sorts of things rush into his mind that do not have much to do with protecting the artwork from her depredations.
The Shape of Things is about how Evelyn changes Adam. This is almost the first time that a girl has even looked at him, and now she is not only offering him all her bedroom skills, but videotaping them for good measure. There are a few things about him, she says, which have to go, like the hairstyle, the flab, the goofy glasses, the biting of fingernails, the bulb on the end of his nose, and that dreadful coat. It is one of the most horrible outer garments you have ever seen, a type that you never see on sale, which completely defines the man, rather like Widmerpool's coat in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. All those changes in Adam undoubtedly constitute an improvement. He looks and feels better, and soon Evelyn is not the only girl who says he is cute.
Some of the suggested changes are a bit more sinister. Evelyn finds out that Adam has been tempted into kissing Jenny, a girl who for ages has discreetly held a flame for him, and that provides her with an excuse to demand that Adam drop his oldest friends for her.
So far, so boring. The plot does eventually arrive at an interesting twist, and there are 15 minutes at the end that are original and intriguing. But The Shape of Things fails to sustain our interest. Kids dating, fighting, kissing or even exhibiting their torsos did not stimulate me enough to keep my yawns at bay. Neil LaBute's dialogue is not bad, but one line after another seemed to fall flat even on the young audience attracted to the New Ambassadors Theatre for this possibly premature revival of a play first seen in London in 2001.
Evelyn (played by Alicia Witt) is a terrific character. Here is an artist with a mission. She would like to change the world, but if she cannot do that (at least not while she is still only 22), she will transform one person's world. It is a latter-day story of Dr Frankenstein, and Adam unwittingly gets to play Evelyn's monster. This girl is totally in control of herself and others. She uses her intelligence, charm and body to manipulate all those unlucky enough to be drawn into her magnetic field.
One question LaBute leaves us with is whether Adam (Enzo Cilenti) is better or worse off at the end for having been converted from a dork to a hunk, but in the process having been chewed up and spat out by Evelyn. The play's title invites us to repudiate judgements made according to a thing's appearance rather than its intrinsic worth. As Adam has become more handsome, he has also started to deceive his friends and has even been tempted by his lust for Evelyn into giving them up. But given how frightful the spectacles and coat were that he wore to begin with, a little moral degeneration is perhaps a price worth paying for the metamorphosis.
Can a remodelled human being be a work of art? Some people think so, and we have had museum shows that included a human lying in a glass exhibition case. Peter Weir's film The Truman Show suggested a future where a person's whole life could become nothing more than a television show for everyone else. Evelyn thinks that the judgement of what constitutes art is wholly subjective. Adam, on the other hand, involuntarily turned into an exhibit by her, believes that "there's got to be a line out there somewhere", because what she has done to him is "a sick fucking joke but it's not art".
Julian Webber directs a slick production, with an excellent stage design, and his four young protagonists are competent and attractive. But the evening felt like a bit of a letdown. Evelyn's revelation of why she really found Adam interesting provides a good dramatic moment, and the discussion of art is mildly thought-provoking. In the end, however, that proves to be not quite enough.
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