Telling it like it is

It's very unusual: this new Neil LaBute play actually has a narrator who isn't lacking in humanity.'

Director David Grindley is musing on the merits of Some Girl(s), which hits London this week. 'Actually, I think LaBute's characters are always very human,' replies Moises Kaufman, who is also directing a new LaBute play, This Is How It Goes, which opens next week.

'Whether they behave badly or behave well, we're always struck by their undeniable sense of truth.'

London is no stranger to the provocative world of Neil LaBute. America's leading playwright of cruelty has had three plays premiere over here in as many years.

A longtime Mormon - although he left the church earlier this year - he is known as much for the controversy he causes as for the quality of his work.

Notorious pieces have included his debut film, In The Company Of Men (1997), in which two men trick a deaf woman into going out with one of them before dumping her, and the play The Shape Of Things, later turned into a film, in which an artist ruins the life of her boyfriend in the name of conceptual art.

His most recent play, The Mercy Seat, was set on September 12, 2001, and featured a man thinking about exploiting the World Trade Center attacks to fake his own death in order to escape his unhappy marriage. Often it's not the conclusions LaBute draws that provoke the volatile response but the lengths to which he goes in order to arrive at them.

Yet behind the shock and awe and the narrative twists is an artist committed to telling the truth. Grindley and Kaufman agree that LaBute is a deeply moral playwright whose real target is the complacency of the white middle classes. This Is How It Goes, partly about racism, sees a man revisiting the town where he grew up. It could prove to be LaBute's most explosive work yet.

'In America, we have become savvy enough to know what is OK to say and what is not,' says Kaufman. 'But that doesn't mean that things have changed underneath. In this play, Neil says: Let's use the theatrical space to have this conversation openly and use words that are forbidden and difficult to discuss. I find that very exciting.

The theatrical space is where the unsayable can be said. The paradox is that showing people behaving in morally questionable worlds is where the work can be the most moral.'

Some Girl(s), meanwhile, which stars Friends actor David Schwimmer, features a man revisiting past girlfriends in a search for atonement. The play even suggests LaBute has softened his world view. 'It has four strong female leads, which is a LaBute first,' Grindley grins. 'The play shows that men have no real sense of the damage they can do.'

Both plays indulge another favourite LaBute subject: the relative nature of truth and the way one person can remember an event in an entirely different way to another. This Is How It Goes features an unusually unreliable narrator who, as Kaufman points out, asks the audience to evaluate how truthful he has been.