CULTURE SHOCK:YASMINA REZA'S God of Carnageis one of the biggest hit international plays of the past five years. It has picked up the Laurence Olivier award for best comedy in the West End and the Tony award for best play on Broadway.
Big-name actors – Ralph Fiennes, Tamsin Greig, Ken Stott, Jeff Daniels, James Gandolfini – have been happy to be cast in it. Roman Polanski will direct the film version. Audiences seem to love it. I have no doubt that it will pack out the Gate in Dublin, where it opened this week.
And it’s easy, at the Gate, to see why the play is so successful. Alan Stanford’s production is brilliantly attuned to the comic rhythms of Reza’s roller-coaster dialogue. There is an excellent cast of Donna Dent, Owen Roe, Ardal O’Hanlon and Maura Tierney, and Roe in particular produces a comic tour de force. The bourgeois-drawing-room setting allows for gorgeous designs from Eileen Diss, Joan O’Clery and Paul Keogan. There is a lovely package of 90 minutes of theatre, with lots of laughs and intimations of some kind of underlying intellectual seriousness. This is not, by any of the usual measures, a remotely bad play.
But there are much worse things than a bad play, and one of them is a crass play. God of Carnageis among the crassest pieces of theatre I have ever seen. It is not immoral or amoral. These are conditions that, in the theatre, can be provocative and powerful. G od of Carnageis, rather, morally tone deaf. Reza seems to have no notion at all that there might be a problem with importing genuine human tragedy into a comedy of middle-class manners just to give it a tinge of Big Theme importance.
There is a famous rule for internet discussion: that the first person to invoke Hitler or the Nazis in a discussion automatically loses the argument.
If there were a theatrical version of this rule, God of Carnagewould never be staged. Reza, albeit in a more sophisticated form, functions like a bad internet debater. In order to lend weight to what is otherwise a slick but banal encounter between two bourgeois couples over a fight between their young sons, she throws in a contemporary equivalent of the hyperbolic Nazi analogy: Darfur. This in a play whose best lines are jokes about a dead hamster.
My objection to this does not arise from any great dislike of banal drawing-room comedies about upper-middle-class couples. When produced as well as God of Carnageis at the Gate, such diversions can provide a great deal of harmless pleasure. The problem usually arises when purveyors of those pleasures come to feel they want to be taken seriously and must make their little comedies into grand statements about the state of humanity.
Usually the result is a lot of sententious and boring, but otherwise harmless, guff. Reza, though, goes for broke. She imports wholesale, undigested and without any apparent hesitation the particular genocide that was raging when God of Carnagewas written: the hideous mass murder and mass rape in Darfur.
It is not, of course, impossible to put genocide and western middle-class manners on the same stage at the same time. Harold Pinter did it more than once. But Pinter was a genius, and he was also incredibly careful. He knew that unspeakable horrors had to be evoked obliquely, as shadows and silences, implications and insinuations. He knew this through both a moral and an aesthetic instinct. He understood the meaning of the word crass.
Reza knows better. Who needs obliqueness? Let’s make one of the middle-class mums the author of a soon-to-be-published book about Darfur.
Let’s put all that human suffering to work illuminating the vacuousness of the lives of wealthy westerners, so that the Darfuris will not have died in vain. They will have allowed Reza to make a heavy-handed point about the thinness of so-called civilisation.
The facile nature of this manoeuvre is obvious in the character of the supposed Darfur expert. Veronica (as she is called here in a not entirely convincing transposition of Parisian haute bourgeoisie to south Dublin) is a very silly woman, a female Mr Pooter, primly punctilious and obsessed with the tidiness of her house. There is absolutely no context in which we can believe that she has been to Darfur, let alone written a publishable book on the subject. It is as if Oscar Wilde had Lady Bracknell suddenly reveal that her study of the exploitative practices of the British Empire is just about to appear.
The effect of Reza’s attempt to build a tower of moral importance on a swamp of banality is to shrink to nothing the difference between genocide and middle-class people behaving badly. This is literally visible in Donna Dent’s performance as Veronica. Dent is a superb actor, but her role embodies Reza’s loss of any sense of proportion.
Thus, there are three times in the play when Dent gives the same, open-mouthed look of utter shock. One is when Annette (Tierney) vomits on her lovely art books. One is when Annette throws her husband’s new iPhone in a vase of water. And the third is when her own husband (Roe) refers to the people of Darfur as coons.
This last moment is obviously meant by Reza to be genuinely shocking. But in a context where all sense of proportion has been lost, it comes across as just another madcap joke. The audience laughs its head off. Dent adopts the same gaping “Oh my God!” expression. We are in a piece of theatre where a racist insult to the victims of genocide is a faux pas of the same order as wrecking a good iPhone.
One wonders what the reaction would be if Auschwitz were substituted for Darfur and Roe’s character used a vile epithet to dismiss the suffering of Jews. But Darfur is far away: far enough, apparently, to be used as a cipher for the unhappiness of rich westerners.
