by PETE STREADER
Back in 2005, the seeds for God of Carnage were sown when French playwright Yasmina Reza’s son returned home with a story about a friend who had his tooth broken in a schoolboy spat. On meeting the victim’s mother in the street, she asked how the son was, to which the mother replied: “Can you imagine? The parents (of the other boy in the fight) didn’t even call me.”
Three months of non-stop scribbling ensued and another classic Reza play was done and dusted. The result was a sharp, witty farce and merciless dissection of the ugly truth that lurks beneath the fragile espresso-sipping bourgeois veneer of two seemingly respectable couples.
Copenhagen audiences now have a chance to watch this pandemonium up close as That Theatre Company brings the quarrelsome quartet of characters to life on stage at Østerbro’s Krudttønden theatre.
God of Carnage (originally Le Dieu du carnage) is a boisterous and barbed romp that opens with a cosy scene of coffee table civility, only to completely disembowel it piece by piece. The aftermath of a playground schoolboy punch-up sees the two outwardly respectable sets of parents convening to ‘talk’ it out. Undertones of tension soon appear in the dialogue: “Is it just a case of boys will be boys?” and what starts with the unbearably superficial observation of diplomatic niceties, gradually degenerates into all-out chaos as the four smug middle class parents let their masks slip to reveal their own grotesque true colours. Misogyny, racism and homophobia become the loaded topics of conversation as they sink deeper into a mire of their own making. Ripping the stuffing out of the pompous characters is one thing, but the play is also fascinating in its forging of fleeting alliances as men and women unite against each other, and the husbands and wives disloyally swap allegiances.
The Copenhagen Post for more
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