For all his postulating on the question of 'What is art?', Neil LaBute seems certain that it's a question that cannot be properly answered or understood without the assistance of Oscar Wilde. Alas, his play is sprinkled with the Irishman's epigrams, as if to remind the audience that, above all else, this is a play about the nature of art. But it's not the answer to the question that counts, rather, it's the act of questioning itself.
Nonetheless, LaBute's decison to make Wilde the play's patron saint (while he's not the only artist referenced, he's definitely the most cited) seems an odd one. Wilde was obsessed with aesthetic beauty and said that “all art is quite useless”. The Shape Of Things, on the other hand, is just as concerned with truth and integrity in art, as it is with its superficiality.
With so much philosophising about art going on, it seems fitting that the production is being staged at the No Vacancy Gallery. It's a performance that will have you doffing your hat and remarking that that Oscar Wilde chap may well have been onto something when he said: “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being”.
No Vacancy Gallery to Sunday 24 March
