Theatre review: The Shape of Things

The production companies that last year brought Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park to the Park Theatre return, with another early hit from a playwright whose later career featured an unfortunate incident involving bees, Neil LaBute. The Shape of Things is the defining LaBute story on themes he's returned to many times - mainly around body image, and the battle of the sexes. Set in and around a college campus, Adam (Luke Newton) is overweight, nerdy and has few friends and fewer relationships. When working one of his two part-time jobs to pay his student loans, as security at an art gallery, he meets Evelyn (Amber Anderson,) an art postgraduate who's planning on defacing one of the statues as a protest against censorship. Far from stopping her he turns a blind eye because he's flattered by her flirting with him.

Theatre review: Loserville

It's barely more than two years since James Bourne and Elliot Davis' amiable teen musical Loserville took an early bath at the Garrick, and already it's back to make its fringe debut. Even with a big budget behind it the show had the feel of being cobbled together from old yoghurt pots and sticky-back-plastic - perhaps one of the qualities that baffled many of the critics and made them take so violently against it - so this lo-fi aesthetic means it translates well to a smaller scale in Michael Burgen's production at the Union. It's set in 1971 and follows the template of every American High School movie, as Michael Dork (Luke Newton) and his friend Lucas (Jordan Fox) obsess over computers, and hope to find a way to send messages between them - what will eventually be known as email. It's only when geeky girl Holly (Holly-Anne Hull) joins the school though, that they start to make real progress.