Michael Richard and Louise Saint-Claire. Photo: Suzy Bernstein
This is definitely one not to be missed. God of Carnage by French playwright Yasmina Reza (‘Art’ and Life x 3) is an up to date and devastating satire on bourgeois hypocrisy in the best French literary tradition.
Two couples meet after the son of Martin and Veronique (Michael Richard and Louise Saint-Claire) knocks the teeth out of the son of Alan and Annette (Jan Ellis and Anna-Mart van der Merwe).
As upper middle class, educated people, they decide to settle the matter in a civilized manner (without law suits) and to do the right thing (talk to the children, reconcile them, pay the medical bills).
However, with shades of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in the course of the discussions and slugging back half a bottle of rum, implications about one another’s parenting and their sense of entitlement and fault, quickly strip off any civilizing veneer. The evening soon descends into a Walpurgisnacht chaos with the couples attacking not only each other, but their own partners.
The cast across the board demonstrate wonderful ensemble playing and director Alan Swerdlow has them well mustered. Richard and van der Merwe excel at astutely observed characterisation. Saint-Claire is a big hit with the audience, often straying into farce, as does this production. Reza famously has reservations about the comic excesses of her work in translation, and here I must side with the author. Too restrained or intellectual a comedy might be less viable, but without the restraint one is robbed of what little empathy Reza has for her characters. When Veronique wails “this is the unhappiest day of my life”, we should feel something for a woman utterly humiliated. Ellis (great to have him back from Sydney, if only briefly) gives the most sympathetic portrayal, but in the least sympathetic role.
Swerdlow has chosen to relocate the work in South Africa, interjecting “shame” here and there and Ellis inserts a “klap”, but there are problems with such willy-nilly transposition. Idiom and character are so specific and intertwined, one finds it hard to place the characters and this becomes a distracting puzzle for the audience. In London the play was not transposed from France, while on Broadway, translator Christopher Hampton (who has worked with Reza on several of her plays) took great care with the adaptation.
Besides these critic’s quibbles, this a rewarding opportunity to see on our local stage a brand new, seriously minded comedy that has garnered many international accolades and deserves every one of them.
