

God of Carnage
Yasmina Reza’s ‘God of Carnage’ is a quintessential ‘00s artefact, up there with MySpace, ‘The Wire’ and the first Strokes album. It’s one of two massive, global hits enjoyed by the French polymath, following on from her gargantuan ‘90s smash ‘Art’. The original, Matthew Warchus-directed, English-language productions of both plays were so of a piece with their eras that neither has had a major revival up to this point (the original ’90s production of ‘Art’ came back a few years ago and felt… dated). I imagine Reza would probably write ‘God of Carnage’ a little differently today. But Nicholai la Barrie’s first revival is a very fair production, that adds a few subtle, modern touches without trying to actually get away from the essence of the writing. Reza’s story concerns two middle-class couples who are meeting to (in theory) politely discuss the fact that the son of Alan (Ariyon Bakare) and Annette (Dinita Gohil) recently used a big stick to knock out a couple of the teeth of the son of Veronica (Freema Agyeman) and Michael (Martin Hutson). It is, in many ways, an exquisitely wrought study in passive aggression. If the couples were a little happier in themselves, the play would end after five minutes. However. Under her ostentatiously cheerful facade, bougie writer Veronica is clearly seething, both at the incident and her feckless husband Michael, whose superficially practical exterior conceals both a craven lack of backbone and a blithe selfishness that has just led to him