GOD OF CARNAGE AT THE ARTS THEATRE
The French: we don’t really think of them as hilarious. Elegant, yes, sexy - certainly, stylish, sensual witty but not really amusing, beyond the odd well placed shoulder-shrug. Yet time after time their sense of humour storms the British and American stage. They started early. Modern actors manage to squeeze a laugh out of Shakespeare’s comedies but the French relish Molière’s full-blown satires on the eighteenth century capers of his own middle class. Moliere took aim at his own society - and truly had it in for the bourgeoisie
In that grand French tradition comes ‘God of Carnage’ by Gallic prize- winning outsider Yasmina Reza, the bizarrely titled play written to tear strips off modern middle class manners. In this case it’s that quagmire of confrontation – kids. Nothing gets the well intentioned Guardian-reading right thinking parent more engaged - and in this case enraged- than what happens to their carefully cultivated offspring. Hence the atavistic reference in the title I assume.
This play takes aim and fires at the mixed motives of protective parenthood. Veronica (played uber-earnestly by Downton Abbey Countess Elizabeth McGovern) and Michael (a peach of a role for Nigel Lindsay as a down-to earth plumbers’ merchant) host another couple Annette and Alan round at their elegant house. It is a not a merry meeting. They are all there to discuss an incident where their guests’ 11 year old son Freddie has hit young Henry (same age) and damaged two teeth. Veronica is restrained but firm, Freddie, using a stick (she later drops ‘armed with’) has knocked her son’s teeth out and their has to be something done about it. Apology? Investigation? Blame ascribed, compensation hinted at. But what begins with polite smiling surface- friendliness soon plummets into out and out confrontation.
Simon Paisley Day as Alan, smooth be–suited father of Freddie, is as tense as a coiled spring. Predictably motives for the assault emerge and when Alan hears young Henry was the head of a ‘gang’ he leaps into action, this changes everything. – including the couples’ solidarity. Michael remembers that as head of his own gang of twelve year olds, he beat up rival Derek Grundy. Alan is sympathetic, the women outraged. And there is a third discussion in full flight. Alan is on his mobile throughout the play. It’s one of those conversations you hear sometimes on trains where the entire context and content is soon revealed. Snapping his whip-sharp orders to underlings, Alan tries to fight off a legal case against a drug discredited in the media. But whilst he is absorbed in call after call, the others are so exasperated (in fact so were we all by the end) it drives his wonderfully well meaning wife (played with super nuance by a glamorous Samantha Spiro) to drink – and a welter of destructive rage
Veronica (Ronnie) played by Elizabeth McGovern
The play is sharp fun and fearless. The God of Carnage is on the rampage, unleashed by a refusal to be wrong when it comes to kids. The ferocity intensifies (as do the laughs). Annette has admired the glorious bowl of fifty tulips on arrival. By the time she leaves she has snatched them out of the vase and hurled them across the room.
Middle Class warfare is wonderfully funny. But this playwright Yazmina Reza (author of Art) dislikes the idea of her play as comedy. And I think she’s right. It is laugh-out-loud but more in shock and horror than casual amusement, and what she exposes as the God of Carnage comes of age is not just fun French capers translated to Islington, but some fundamental very unfunny ferocities of modern life.
Annette finally loses it whilst husband Alan,Simon Paisley Day looks on
