God of Carnage

The ‘God of Carnage’ cringed as he descended onto the Baroque carpeted boards of the Gate theatre. Once settle in his creaky seat you could feel him flinch each time the over anxious audience guffawed like a bad laughter track. Smothered by the smell of tea from the audience he watched four actors latch onto their lines and furnish them with great gusto but little forethought. Even this God, dedicated to butchery, squirmed as Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s ‘Le Dieu du Carnage’ traded its tragedy for humour using scenes of projectile vomiting as a comic coup de theatre.

While a South Dublin playground replaces the French battle-ground the premise stays the same; two couples trying to work out their children’s antics but they themselves descend the slippery slope of childishness until each character has been stripped of politeness and chaos ensues. As their relationship and ideological boundaries shift, allegiances are formed and crushed in the space between Ardal O’Hanlon’s irritating phone calls. Alcohol is imbibed, truths are told and relationships are laid bare. And so it turns into a study of how the primitive omnivore inside even the upper-middle-class can be laid bare. Yet this spectacle of spectatorship is ruined by bad slapstick that loses its edge when the insults are turned into elegant jokes and any sense of tragedy dissipates as it plays the audience for laughs.

What this bastardised tragedy needs is a strong cast to carry it, to really bite into its theme of the primitive beneath the proper with Plato-like rhetoric. The Westend Production played Ralph Fiennes, Tamsin Greig, Janet McTeer and Ken Stott who pulled off an emergency lit production on their first night. The Gate’s production makes its nouveau riche couples a mix match of Father Ted, Ballykissangel, Bachelors Walk and ER. So the audience, sold a night of tittering with Fr Dougal do just that and gone is the sense of Yasmina Reza’s ironic tragedy.

The rich Dublin living room, far from ‘Bushy Park’, seems more like an extension of the gate theatre, set at a tapering angle to give the illusion of a grand living room. A lustre of afternoon sun, created by lighting designer Paul Keogan, pours into the high ceilinged room and gives an air of elegance to the stage, coupled with the lofty stairs in the background it creates a sense of a fine house behind the room. The audience is introduced to an upset Veronica (Donna Dent) and Michael Vallon (Owen Roe): their son, Bruno, has lost two teeth after being attacked by Ferdinand, the son of Annette (Maura Tierney) and Alan Reille (Ardal O Hanlon). The couples, clad in business suits and Dalkey couture by Joan O'Clery, are brought together by the violence and set about discussing how to handle the situation. What starts as an amicable debate between the two couples begins to escalate, until all pleasantness is dissolved and the adults, with alliances constantly realigning from partner to gender, revert to acting like children themselves until each of them is left broken from the experience.

As the play progresses the true nature of their characters are revealed. Ardal O Hanlon plays the cynical lawyer who calmly states that his son is “a savage”, yet breaks down into catatonic shock when his mobile phone goes for a swim at the hands of wife. Donna Dent tries to cling on to her civilised values as the 'cultured' Véronique but ultimately succumbs to the law of the jungle when she turns in lioness-like anger on her visitors. And Maura Tierney makes a highly believable and amusing transition as the mousey Annette who finds freedom and power in rum, and turns into a kind of mischievous, giggling sprite. Owen Roe transforms from an O’Carroll-Kelly lapdog to a “descendant from Spartacus” when it turns out that his son, the victim of the incident, may in fact be a gang-leading aggressor. And when attention falls on him for dumping his daughter’s hamster in the street, his veneer cracks to reveal a feral man happy to confess that he’s a “Neanderthal,” hardly caring that in doing so he has announced himself to be a member of the species his Avoca clad wife has ostensibly devoted her life to eradicating.

Director Alan Stanford, just returned from directing Pinter’s Betrayal and Celebration in the USA, gallops the play to the final curtain in an hour and a half, without intermission, and leaves you wondering how different the experience would be if the play was in its native language and original form.

Presented by arrangement with David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers the God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Alan Stanford, design by Joan O'Clery, lighting design by Paul Keogan. With Donna Dent, Owen Roe, Maura Tierney and Ardal O Hanlon.