The Shape of Things, New Ambassadors, London

When Professor Higgins performs his stunning makeover of Eliza Dolittle, he's greatly - indeed, odiously - pleased with the result. But he'd never feel inclined to package his handiwork as the submission for a university thesis in applied art theory and criticism. And Eliza was conscious (to a degree) of what was happening to her. So it's a fair bet that both would view with distaste the deadly wheeze perpetrated by Evelyn, the sexy young art major at a Midwestern college, in Neil Labute's play The Shape of Things.

Premiered here in the author's staging in 2001 and since made into a film with the same principals, this tight, troubling four-hander is revived in an excellently cast production by Julian Webber that seems to me far superior to the original. It manages to replenish the ozone layer around a piece that can, like much of Labute's work, come across as scarcely less nasty and narrow-minded about human possibility than the low-down scam it satirises. Without slackening the tension, this version has a range of suggestiveness that was lacking in Labute's tunnel-visioned, thesis-hammering pursuit of the "provocative".

For example, it hadn't occurred to me that the set-up has certain affinities with Thirties screwball comedy. Brilliantly played here by Alicia Witt, Evelyn is a lethal variant of the headstrong, madcap heroine who blithely enslaves/liberates and then hurls into havoc a bespectacled, geeky type, here embodied by Enzo Cilenti's tremendously sympathetic Adam. A nerdy student, he falls for the sexy, manipulative Evelyn (whose attractiveness, when played by Witt, is valuably more campus and less catwalk than it was when conveyed by Rachel Weisz).

Before you can say "Frankenstein", she has him losing weight, getting a cool haircut, having his nose fixed and generally disturbing his jock buddy Philip (whose macho defensiveness is well caught by James Murray) and Philip's fiancée Jenny (an amusingly insecure and outwitted Sienna Guillory), for whom Adam still holds a guttering torch. But patience with Adam's naivety has a job surviving the scene in which Evelyn asks him to smile at the bedside movie camera while she treats him to fellatio. What audience does he think she has in mind for the footage? Their grandchildren?

The production hustles the play along with the help of blasts of rock music and a two-way conveyor belt of captioned scenes. Particularly admirable is the way this version brings out the vulnerability of youth and the underlying sadness in Evelyn's project of using Adam as the unwitting material for an art installation.

The atmosphere at her climactic lecture is hauntingly desolate, the absence of triumphalism an indication of how aware she is, at some level, that hers is only a compromised victory over the forces of the glossy-mag culture of perfectability that she wanted to push to a blatant extreme. As with the female student whose intransigence proves destructive in David Mamet's Oleanna, the passing of time has shifted the emphasis from the horror of what they do to the ways society has failed them and prompted retribution.

You could never warm to a play by Neil Labute, any more than you could cuddle up with a lab-rat experiment. But Webber's take on The Shape of Things makes it look almost humanist.

Booking to 3 July (0870 060 6627)