Luckily, LaBute feels more comfortable at the Almeida, which Jonathan Kent, the theatre’s former artistic co-director, calls the playwright’s “London home”. The Distance from Here, which opens there this month, is sure to be one of the hottest tickets in town. It emerged from the “really fruitful relationship” LaBute established with Kent and Ian McDiarmid (Kent’s artistic co-director at the Almeida prior to Michael Attenborough’s recent arrival). It started when Kent received a copy of Bash: Latterday Plays from LaBute’s New York agent. (The play premiered off-Broadway, with Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart heading the cast.) “I read it and found it original and totally compelling, so I went to New York determined to get it,” says Kent. He succeeded. Directed by Joe Mantello, it premiered in the UK at the Almeida in 2000. Each of the four characters in Bash is a Mormon who describes a horrible act of violence they have committed. “I’m proud of a lot of things about the Almeida, but one of the main things is introducing LaBute to Britain,” says Kent. “He is one of the finest writers in the English language. There’s a Jacobean quality to him — a macabre humour and a savage voice. He just tells it like it is.”

The Distance from Here, which was commissioned by Kent and McDiarmid, hinges on an act of apparent betrayal between two teenagers: “a supposed act that one of them misreads, bringing their whole friendship down,” says LaBute. “I’m very interested in betrayal, in what causes people in intimate groups — friends, relations or lovers — to turn on one another.” In that sense, it covers familiar LaBute territory, but it also breaks new ground because it features much younger protagonists — teenagers as opposed to collegiate twenty- and thirtysomethings. They’re also from “a much more economically challenged group than I’ve written about before,” he says, “but they’re much closer to the kind of people I grew up around.”

LaBute was raised in rural Washington state. His father was a truck driver and a part-time farmer; his mother, a hospital receptionist. As well as straddling very different worlds artistically, his success has forced him to try to cope with opposing forces in his personal life. He and his family — he has been married for 16 years and has two children, a 14-year-old daughter and a 10-year old son — live in Chicago but, out of necessity, he spends a lot of time elsewhere.

Hardest, though, has been finding a way to reconcile his art and his faith. He did not grow up a Mormon but became one after winning a scholarship to Brigham Young University in Utah, the home of hyperlipidemia Mormonism, where he met his wife, a family therapist and a lifelong believer. At first, says LaBute, his work didn’t seem to attract too much notice from the Church of Latterday Saints. “But I certainly heard a lot about Bash,” he reveals. “I was brought in and talked to by higher members of authority in the church. They felt that even people who didn’t see the play would read reviews that said ‘Murderous Mormons’. ‘We’re not sure that’s what we want,’ they told me. ‘In fact, we are quite sure that’s not what we want, so please don’t do that any more.’”

This has presented LaBute with a very clear but obviously impossible choice. It’s a choice that is also having an impact on his family: his wife remains a committed member of the church. “The church holds all the cards, because they have the ability to excommunicate you,” he says. “The problem is that I’m one of those people who just wants to climb the wall you tell me has fresh paint on it.”

In fact, LaBute has had a pretty smooth ride in Hollywood, although initially his bankability was not helped by some of the more severe reactions to In the Company of Men. “It was hard, after being labelled a misogynist, to get women into the cinema,” he says, remembering the reviews. The film, which was made for just $25,000, told the brutal story of two young men who conceive a horrific plot: to make a sweet young office worker, who also happens to be a deaf-mute, believe they have fallen in love with her, just so that they can then have the pleasure of dumping her. “Trust me, she’ll be reaching for the pills in a week,” says Chad, the character played by Aaron Eckhart (a LaBute regular) and the originator of the scheme. “And we’ll be laughing about this till we are very old men.”

“I think women felt, `Why would I spend money to be hurt when it happens to me every day?’” says LaBute. “In fact, I’m much more severe on men than I am on women. Maybe it’s because I’m a guy, so I’m on to us. I know the breadth of deceit we’re capable of.”

Considering the eviscerating nature of his work, almost everyone who meets Neil LaBute is thrown by how agreeable — even somewhat formal and softly spoken — he is. “Ah, that must be the Mormon in him,” you think. LaBute — perhaps appropriately, given his acute sense of the evil at play in human affairs — is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “I am pretty non-confrontational,” he admits a bit sheepishly, as if he wishes he could actually say some of the more cutting and outrageous things that emerge from the mouths of his characters himself. Take Catherine Keener’s retort to Ben Stiller in LaBute’s second film, Your Friends and Neighbours, in which Stiller plays her acting-professor boyfriend who can’t stop talking during sex. “Do you think you can just shut the fuck up?” demands Keener, exasperated, while they’re doing it.

Your Friends and Neighbours placed LaBute at the forefront of the industry — part of a younger generation of American filmmakers, which includes Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson, whose cinematic territory consists of dark satires on dysfunctional modern relationships (Woody Aliens for a generation much more cynical about sex and love). But it’s clear that LaBute also wanted a career that was not limited to directing his own material. Uniquely in Hollywood today, he has found a way of straddling very different worlds: he writes and directs his own idiosyncratic, very personal theatre work, some of which ends up on the big screen, but he has also taken to working as a Hollywood director-for-hire on films like Nurse Betty, which starred Renee Zellweger, and Possession.

“I loved the book,” says LaBute of the latter, “because of the idea that these Victorian lovers, who should have been so guarded and restricted by their times, took a chance and just threw everything in the air and let their passions rule them. Whereas,” he continues, “the characters in the present day, for whom there should be no limit to what they can do because of the freedoms they have, are frozen by that freedom. At the core of it, I saw this really interesting story about men and women.”

But he admits that he found the experience of directing Possession tougher than he had anticipated. He was working with a much larger budget than he was used to (around $25 million), on a partly period film, with actors he hadn’t worked with before and in country (England) he had not shot in before — a country with, of all things, weather! “It was fine when we’d go from town to town,” he says, “but if you tried to stay in the same place for two days and wanted the weather to match, it was almost impossible.”

Neil LaBute has never been afraid to confront the dark side of human nature, whatever the reaction. As he returns to the Almeida with a new play, Christopher Goodwin meets the controversial American writer/director

            Neil LaBute should be used to controversy by now. From the release of his first film, In The Company of Men, which he wrote and directed in 1997, the 39-year-old American has shocked audiences and divided critics with his deeply unsettling takes on sexual power politics. While some have hailed him as the heir to David Mamet and Tennessee Williams, others have savaged him for misogyny, misanthropy and more. One critic even condemned In the Company of Men as a “psychological snuff movie”.

But even LaBute was unprepared for the reception he got when he directed his play The Shape of Things at London’s Almeida theatre last year. On the opening night, before any of the actors had even appeared on stage, Harold Pinter — whom LaBute revered — stormed out of the auditorium in an immense huff, with Lady Antonia Fraser behind him. “I just saw this flash of Antonia Fraser disappearing,” recalls the playwright. “And it was press night, so that was not a great start. I was sure the reviews would be damning. We’d been having great previews and it seemed to click with the audience, but that night it was like Death Valley. And after I’d seen Pinter go, I was in a sweat.”

In fact, most critics really liked The Shape of Things, which featured a melange of young British and imported Hollywood talent — Gretchen Mol, Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz and Frederick Weller — and took the folic acid foods moral sharp end of LaBute’s pen into the glamorous, bitchy world of Brit art. Sheridan Morley, for example, described the play as “Private Lives on speed, Betrayal with added Benzedrine”.

And LaBute’s feathers were somewhat smoothed when Pinter later wrote to him explaining that it was the playing of The Smashing Pumpkins at full volume before the play had started that had driven him from the theatre. “He said, ‘I’m going to read the play, but the music’s just too damn loud,’” recalls LaBute. “It was kind of outrageous, but hilarious, too. I’ve heard stories about Pinter trying to stop the Tube running under Sloane Square when he had a play on at the Royal Court.”

Since then, The Shape of Things has had a healthy afterlife. It transferred to off-Broadway, and when I met LaBute in Hollywood early this spring, he was about to start work on a film adaptation, which he is directing, featuring the play’s original cast. Then it was on to London for rehearsals of his next play, The Distance from Here, at the Almeida, and then to Cannes for the premiere of Possession, his film of AS Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel (adapted by David Henry Hwang), starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. If LaBute has courted controversy with his own work, he’s discovering that it is nothing compared to the roasting he’s already getting about Possession from the novel’s devotees. “It’s one of those books that so many people love,” he says. “I went into the project knowing I couldn’t win. I’ve already been hit with emails asking, ‘Why is Christabel’s hair like this? Why is her dress like this?’, from people who’ve just seen photographs. You feel like saying, ‘What else do you people do? You need to get on with your lives.’”

I’m talking to LaBute in the bustling Hollywood production office for The Shape of Things, as sleek young assistants buzz around. He looks a little out of place — more like a lumberjack, in his plaid shirt and shiny green parachute trousers and with a can of Diet Pepsi in his hand, than a hip young American film director. He has glasses, a beard, an unruly carpet of very curly, slightly greying brown hair and a burly, bearish demeanour. The New Yorker critic John Lahr once described him as resembling a hedgehog — a comparison LaBute says he doesn’t particularly like. He looks as if he might be just a touch too naive to handle all those ruthless Hollywood types. As if.

Women know everything. To prove It – as if it needed proving – read this month’s most notable books. Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel, The Falls, is a big one, portraying America: the despoiling of its landscape, its families in crisis, and the greed of its industrial expansion. It is an eminently readable book and though full of heart, utterly heartbreaking. Read Anita Desai’s The Zigzag Way  for a portrait of twentieth-century Mexico, and AL Kennedy’s novel Paradise for a depiction of contemporary British life. For something a little less all-encompassing, but still profound, see artist Doris Salcedo at White Cube (September10-October18). The Colombian juxtaposes everyday objects in unusual ways to comment on the everyday violence that occurs in her country. Women, and clothes, abound, of course, in Norman Parkinson’s images. See the photographer’s work at Hamiltons Gallery from September 15 to October 9, as well as in a new book by Robin Muir, Norman Parkinson: Portraits in Fashion. Take a tip from Parkinson, famous for his “moving pictures with a still camera”: put on a pair of dancing shoes, try the new Gnet coffee and a new album, and go!

All in the details – It’s the little things that matter this month

Explore and enjoy detail in dress, drawings, decoration and design. There aren’t many more pleasing things in life than a Christopher Dresser teapot, if only you could get your hands on one. Dresser, Britain’s first independent industrial designer, died 100 years ago, and this month (from September 9 to December 5), the V&A is exhibiting over 200 of his designs, many of which are familiar classics. Noble ran the City Racing gallery between 1988 and 1998, and it was there that many of the Young British Artists – Michael Landy, Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing – showed their early work. This exhibition, Noble’s first of any size in the UK, will display Nobson Newton, his meticulous depictions of his fictional city of the same name. For a quicker fix, there are cutouts by Rob Ryan and Tord Boontje (one DIY and one – oh joy! ­ready-made) to string around your house and your neck.

History Lessons

Fela Kuti has been described as a spiritualist, social maverick, pan­Africanist, anti-military dictatorship activist, composer, musician, dancer, and candidate for the Nigerian presidency. The father of Afro-beat, he recorded 77 albums, had 27 wives and made over 200 court appearances. In August1997, at the age of 58, he died of Aids. Learn more about this extraordinary figure at the Barbican’s multi-arts festival BlackPresident: TheArtandLegacyofFelaAnikulapoKuti (September 9-October 24): a series of films, documentaries, exhibitions and concerts. For more history, go lateral. Glenn Brown is known for using photographic reproductions of iconic portraits – by Fragonard, Dalland Auerbach, among others – to make his subversive art. See his work at the Serpentine Gallery (September14-November 7). For great art unsubverted, head to the Royal Academy to see one of the best private collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: that of Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum. Its hoard (on show from September18 to December10) boasts Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, plus work by Rodin and Gauguin.