The God of Carnage

Gate Theatre, Dublin

“How many parents, defending their children, become infantile themselves?” asks Veronica, the mother of an 11-year-old whose teeth have been rearranged during a playground altercation in Yasmina Reza’s morality farce. That rhetorical line is both the premise and promise of this French comedy, translated by Christopher Hampton, one so basic in outline that it begs for a deeper reading.

Lightly daubed with local references, the Gate’s Irish premiere may remove some cultural obstacles from our view of this microcosmic skirmish, but a thinning plot and broadening comedy conspire to get in the way of our identification. Alan Stanford’s production certainly benefits from shrewd comic performances, but it lacks the punch of implicating its audience in the bourgeois buffoonery.

That shouldn’t be the case with a play that jabs high-mindedness with low comedy, contrasting a patronising belief in “the soothing powers of culture” with someone who spews vomit over an art catalogue of Kokoschka. An unnecessarily slow build towards this disorder halts the flow of comedy, but an admirably different Ardal O’Hanlon finds his stride early as corporate lawyer, Alan. Slick as an otter and just as flexible, Alan dodges culpability for a pharmaceutical client (“We’ll think about the victims later.”) while simultaneously hanging his progeny out to dry (“Our son is a savage.”).

Responsibility and hypocrisy are the central concerns of the play (Alan, who firmly believes in the god of carnage, curiously avoids both) and, standing in a deceptively unthreatening cardigan against the blank affluence of Eileen Diss’s set, Owen Roe looks like he wouldn’t harm a hamster.

Roe pivots expertly between genial and bestial, supplying the funniest and most revealing moments of the play, but Donna Dent as his high-strung wife Veronica and Maura Tierney as the nauseous Annette have less to work with.

Lubricated by rum, fickle allegiances form and break between different spouses like a combative key party, while mentions of the genocide in Darfur and child soldiers in the Congo mingle uncertainly with gender stereotypes: the “John Waynish idea of virility” as Alan puts it. Even Dent, the conscience of the play, is roundly dismissed for hand-wringing self-interest.

Eventually, nihilistic and Neanderthal arguments come to dominate and an unlikely chorus of casual misogyny, homophobia and racism bleeds wit from the dialogue while razing any moral high ground.

Farce may revel in extremes, but here that overstatement is less amusing than numbing. We see grown-ups – and by extension society – not in the throes of childish tantrums, but in the exaggerated distortion of cartoons. Does nothing shock us?

Until March 26th