Ralph Fiennes as Alain and Janet McTeer as Veronique star in God of Carnage
THIS play opens at the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftsbury Avenue in an angry, bold red room equipped with all the trimmings of middle-class life; a leather sofa, two bowls white tulips and a coffee table scattered with fashionable art books.
This is the back drop to Yasmina Reza's hit play (translated from French by Christopher Hampton) and the back of the bus for two sets of parents feuding over their children's grievances.
In a Paris playground, one boy has hit another with a stick, knocking out two of his teeth.
Alain, played by Ralph Fiennes, is the cynical, unscrupulous lawyer father of the villain in the schoolboys' quarrel, reluctantly supporting his wife Annette, played by Tamsin Greig - known from TV's Black Books and Green Wing - as they visit the opposing parents in search of a civilised resolution.
In the setting of their living room, domestic salesman Michel and cultured writer Véronique (Ken Stott and Janet McTeer) engage in awkward small talk with their guests, skirting around the issue in a politically-correct, moralistic manner.
Cracks soon begin to emerge on the smooth surface and what starts as an evening of peacemaking descends into neurotic chaos amongst long, nervy silence.
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Allegiances are formed and broken throughout the simultaneously benign but eventful night as crevasses of disagreement open up, not only between the two couples, but also between husbands and wives.
There is no weak link in this hilarious play with highly convincing onstage vomiting from Greig, immense irritation from Fiennes as he answers his calls to a corrupt pharmaceutical industry for the umpteenth time. Stott's unappreciated working class outbursts, and McTeer playing an excellent village drunk as she shouts obscenities and necks neat rum.
Attitudes to politics, money, morality and hamster killing are debated in front of an audience who role in the aisles and cheer the in-jokes and crucial slapstick moments, as this play about degenerating manners reveals the four adults, spoiling for a fight, to be no more evolved than their children.
While occasional over-complication of the language makes the French translation easy to spot and the repetition almost stops being funny, the ninety-minute satire ends at exactly the right moment and the constant change of mood and pace guarantees and deserves a full house.
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