The Shape of Things at the Maidment Theatre

By PETER CALDER

Reading the script of Neil LaBute's play robs its performance of the advantage of surprise. Yet the ending, which blindsided this reader (although several opening night punters told me they saw it coming a mile off) is plainly where the idea of the play was born.

So to watch this Auckland Theatre Company production with foreknowledge allows one to see the clues, subtle and otherwise, that LaBute gives about where he's headed.

It also reveals that the play he wrote is not the one the ATC is presenting. Crucially, and in my view fatally, director Oliver Driver has opted to drop a final piece of action which underlines LaBute's central idea: that in the terrible struggle of human affairs there is often, perhaps always, a complicity between predator and prey.

It's a decision which smoothes the ethical texture of the ending and, by extension, the whole piece, sweetening with sentiment what should have been acidic. The tears glistening on actor Benjamin Farry's face as he took his bow may have been the sign of a good night's work, but I suspect LaBute would snort with rage at the sight.

In essence the play is a vicious modern spin on the Pygmalion story. When English major Adam (Farry) meets art student Evelyn (Danielle Cormack) she makes changes - to him - which begin to take on an increasingly sinister tone. Too late he realises the implication of her interest.

LaBute, whose choppy, syncopated dialogue recalls David Mamet but is driven by a Machiavellian glee all his own, is well served here by a fine cast. The central duo, along with Scott Wills as Adam's mate Phillip and Josephine Davison as his colourless fiancee, Jenny, maintain almost faultless American accents and keep up a cracking pace with a text full of overlapping lines that simply demands to be taken a little too fast for anyone's comfort.

Cormack and Farry work extraordinarily well together, though they never look like a couple in love.

The set, made of sliding panels which serve as blank slates on which to project lighting effects and some irritatingly busy slideshows, constitute the strongest visual hint of what's coming and the soundtrack, by Paul Casserly of The Strawpeople, is creepy and evocative.

Yet in the end it feels faintly old-fashioned.

It's undeniably entertaining and this company has made a fine fist of it. But it touches the dark, malevolent heart which beats at the play's centre only at moments. Ultimately it is a slight theatrical diversion rather than a memorable piece of theatre.