Carnage

Yasmina Reza's 2006 play, Le Dieu du carnage just finished its scheduled four-week run and week of extra performances at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (in case you were thinking I might write a review of a play in time for it to be useful to someone). I saw Art in London about ten years ago and really loved it. Art is one of those plays in which nothing happens: three friends stand on stage talking about a painting one of them bought, a very expensive all-white canvas. I don't remember it being deep or revolutionary in its message, but it was a bit of intellectualish entertainment. Le Dieu du carnage seemed to promise a similar experience: four people in a living room, in real time. And I laughed a lot during the performance. There are some good jokes and the four actors were amazing, and brought out all the comedy in the text and possibly more.

They were so funny, in fact, that my neighbour wondered afterwards whether the content might have come to us as more substantial if the buffoonery had been toned down a little by the director (Lorraine Pintal, also the artistic director of the TNM, who I'm a bit dubious about; the productions she directs never seem to be among my favourite of the season). Because one was left with a feeling that although the play appears to be giving you all sorts of witty reflections on life, there is no wittiness and no reflection left when the curtain falls. It's all just jokes. I did genuinely find it funny, and disagreed with an unknown man, friend of my neighbour, who claimed that people laughed too readily, because they had been primed to think it was an outstandingly funny show.

There's an extremely naturalistic on-stage vomiting scene, which I enjoyed. There's the four high-culture snobs and then the vomit, all over the front of the stage, through the uptight lady's hands, which cover her mouth the entire time she's spewing, as though she could hold it back and save some dignity. She fully gives up on that idea later on, and lets loose more than any of the others after awhile. There were also some funny dramatizations of a few things: the woman driven nuts by her husband's cell phone, which he never turns off, the couple who are totally freaked out about vomit getting on their special out-of-print art show catalogue, the mother who wants to come across as calm and neutral but is really seething at the other little boy and wants not only for him to apologize to her son but to be able to lecture him herself, face to face, in a formally agreed-to meeting.

I don't mind a show that does nothing other than deliver good jokes (though I confess, I might not like it as much as I'd like to think I like it; I tend to require a bit of meat if I'm going to enjoy myself for more than a few minutes -- and I think most people do). The only disappointment here is that the play sets itself up as a thinker's comedy: the characters ask, do we ever do things for anyone other than ourselves, really? and discuss the savagery of childhood, and the falseness of something they keep referring to as civilization. The premise, two couples getting together to discuss the fact that one of their sons has hit the other one in the face with a stick, is a good one. And she brings in good elements. But to raise all these potentially interesting questions and then go nowhere with them creates a dissatisfaction that needn't have been there if there hadn't been the pretension of probing major themes. Nonetheless, it was a very enjoyable evening.