Review: GOD OF CARNAGE, Theatre Royal Bath

If people really do have layers, then Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage is 80 minutes of stripping them away. One by one she removes the layers of politeness and civility until you're left with the core of her characters, for better or worse.

It's a deceptively simple premise: two sets of parents are brought together after one boy attacks the other armed (or was that 'furnished'?) with a stick. Thus, in the spirit of reconciliation, the parents have come together to sort it out. Of course, there's no topic quite like parenting technique to split opinions in a room. Reza (translated by Christopher Hampton) revels in the middle-class awkwardness of the discussion.

There's 'boy done good' Michael and his wife Veronica (the type of smug parent who proclaims she fills the gaps in the educational system by taking their children to art galleries). On the other side, there's cynical lawyer Alan, who has a blackberry constantly attached to his ear and Annette, a wealth manager who seems desperate to make the situation work.

An initially slow but polite 20 minutes gives way to a pacy comedy, helped by four well-cast comic talents. Nigel Lindsay as Michael is exceptional. While Michael is having to sit back and let his wife eulogise on her new book about Darfur, you feel the act wearing thinner, rage building inside him until he can no longer contain it and exclaims 'we've tried to be nice...but I am fundamentally uncouth!'.

Amanda Abbington and Ralph Little play Annette and Alan well as a dysfunctional couple who can't seem to agree on...well, anything really. The only thing that unites them of sorts is when Veronica (a perfectly prim Elizabeth McGovern) criticises them and they enter a kind of siege mentality. Abbington displays the best kind of hand-wringing awkwardness that gives way to an empowered, emboldened Annette, which is as close as you come to a likeable character.

Likeable characters are not something Reza is known for, but it works because we all recognise these self-obsessed traits in her characters - as the veneer wears off and true motivations are revealed, the play descends further into farce, but the characters become more real.

There are genuine laugh-out-loud moments and director Lindsay Posner has kept fluidity in a potentially static piece. For just under an hour and a half, you watch as the two couples provide an excellent advert for contraception...

God of Carnage at Bath Theatre Royal until 15 September

Photo Credit: Nobby Clark

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