Barely three years after its Almeida premiere, Neil LaBute's play about the amorality of art is back in a new production. But a play that seemed mildly provocative on a first viewing now looks as coldly manipulative as its heroine.
LaBute certainly makes things tricky for the critic. All one can reveal is that Evelyn, a postgrad art student, meets the nerdish Adam in a midwestern museum where she's about to spray-paint a penis onto a statue. She does an even more thorough makeover job on the hopelessly smitten Adam. So successful is she that Adam's lapsed passion for an ex- classmate, about to marry his best friend, is rekindled with disastrous consequences.
In so far as the play deals with the fragility of friendship and the illusion of love, it is edgily watchable. But LaBute is also concerned with the conflict between art and morality and the grandstanding exhibitionism of contemporary conceptualism. By not revealing his hand until three-quarters of the way through, however, he short-circuits intellectual debate. And, in making the play depend on a narrative switch, LaBute devalues it as drama. Hamlet will always be a greater play than The Mousetrap because it gains, rather than loses, once you know the plot: LaBute's play, however, is diminished by foreknowledge.
It could still work if you felt something vital was at stake but Julian Webber's revival puts style above content. Simon Higlett's chic design treats each scene as if it were a captioned art exhibit without ever suggesting the play's roots in small-town American life.
Alicia Witt comes off best as Evelyn in that she allows us to see the steeliness lurking beneath the character's altruistic affection; but even she is handicapped by LaBute's card-stacking device of emphasising the art student's literary ignorance. Enzo Cilenti also does a neat Woody Allen impersonation as Adam but Sienna Guillory and James Murray as his old friends remain essentially blank canvases. In the end the play seems less a debate about modern art than a clever theatrical con-trick in which we, like Adam, emerge decisively duped.
· Until July 3. Box office: 0870 060 6627.
