The review – Must boundaries exist (?)
Borders should be crossed in art, but isn’t it necessary to have a wall beyond these borders through which no one should break through? Or is absolute freedom a condition of art?
The heroine of the Shape of Things production, Evelyn, sees a raw unwrought material in an inconspicuous young man, aptly named Adam, whom she can transform completely according to her ideas, and then present the resulting perfect Adam as her final term project. However, the manipulative Evelyn, looking only at her interests, changes the lives not only of Adam’s but also of his friends.
She calls this project in a somewhat oxymoron manner a “living statue” that forces us to search for Evelyn’s intention to some extent. Is she trying to humanize art in this way, or to depersonalize Adam’s character?
Stage equipment and costumes are not eccentric in any way. The characters’ clothing reflects their characters well, including Adam’s transformation. And perhaps it is this mundaneness of the scenography that is supposed to evoke in us a certain feeling of insecurity. As absurd as Evelyn’s project may seem to us, we cannot deny that it is not unrealistic.
Alexandra Trávniková as Evelyn can convince you at one point that she wants only the best for Adam, and then you have goosebumps from her cold treatment. On the other hand, you believe everything in her project portrayed by Martin Zachar. Rooted timidity, fear, kindness, and anger mixed with the humiliation with which he masked his heart broken by colossal deception and the woman he was determined to marry.
The play by the American playwright Neil LaBute, staged by the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, opens up a topic focused on the boundaries of art, their surpassing and, to a certain extent, the ethical question of this action. In the end, when the plot culminates and the truth comes to the surface, we are forced to judge how far are the boundaries within ourselves, which we would no longer cross, and thus somehow imaginarily lean to the side of the creator or the created.
Anežka Staňková (UPOL)