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God of Carnage
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Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 6AR
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Rating:
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© Alastair Muir
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- Director Matthew Warchus, translator Christopher Hampton and playwright Yasmina Reza struck box office gold a decade ago with ‘Art’. One reason, perhaps, why such a stellar cast has been attracted to Reza’s slight and overbearing new satire. ‘God of Carnage’ sets four bourgeois hypocrites up for a fall: the well-meaning Vallons (Ken Stott and Janet McTeer) have invited the well-heeled Reilles (Ralph Fiennes and Tamsin Greig) for coffee and clafoutis. They mean to be civilised. But what they’re all tactically tiptoeing around is the fact that the Reilles’ youngster has recently broken the Vallons’ son’s face with a big stick.
Mark Thompson’s design (hygienic white sofa in the foreground, blood-red walls at the back) emphasises the savagery that they’re all, in Hampton’s sometimes stiffly Frenchified phrases, trying to repress. With McTeer gasping sonorously about her forthcoming book on Darfur, the kids are not the only irresolvable conflict on the table. And when Greig’s spikily buttoned-up ‘wealth advisor’ Annette vomits uncontrollably over the Vallons’ actual table, squabbles, insults and playground-level power-play break out all over the place.
Reza’s play presents a darkly comic set-up about the hidden despair in two middle-class marriages. But it doesn’t punch hard or deeply enough to satisfy: a weak sub-plot about a hamster, and a bottle of rum, make lame catalysts for destruction. But Warchus’s emphatic production is a pleasure, and benefits from excellent acting. McTeer’s bell-like voice makes do-gooder Véronique’s banal profundities ring out hilariously; Ken Stott is a lilting, powerful foil as Véronique’s secretly racist husband, while Fiennes plays a cynical lawyer, joined at the earlobe to his mobile and dodgy pharmaceutical clients. His degeneration into elegantly wasted dignity is nuanced and surprising. And Greig boasts two moments of cathartic glory: her spectacular chunder; and the moment where she gibbers and leaps over the stylish sofa, as triumphant as a monkey, after drowning her husband’s phone in a bowl of tulips.
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Details
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Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 6AR
- 0870 040 0046
- Category: West End
- Times: Mon-Sat 8pm, Wed & Sat Mats 3pm
- Price: £12.50-£47.50. Booking to Jun 14
- Tube: Piccadilly Circus
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3 comments
Trite, facile and dreary. Lazy, predictable attempts at humour. Shouldn't really be this hard to put the boot into pretentious, middle class stereotypes. Rest of the audience seemed to like it though.
I couldn't disagree with you more. Admittedly, it started slowly, as an awkward conversation of this nature would do, but as soon as Annette (Grieg) had her explosion(!) the heat was on and I was riveted.
I spent £45 to see this 90 minute piece of rubbish. I loved all the cast, they were doing their best - but th play and the crushinly slow pace of the direction/dialogue made this 90 minute play feel like Tamburlaine. Stott and fiennes have the best lines.