God Of Carnage

Gate Theatre, Dublin Previews Feb 4-7 Opens Feb 8-Mar 26 7.30pm (Sat mat 2.30pm) 01-8744045 gate-theatre.ie

Carnage results when two sets of middle-class parents politely convene to solve the playground dispute of their 11-year-old boys. Yasmina Reza’s 2006 social farce is less about childish behaviour and warring neighbours than the simmering pot of tensions underlying society itself, where morality itself becomes as loose as the milk teeth of juvenile brawlers.

All of which makes God of Carnageseem like an unlikely celebrity vehicle, but both Ralph Fiennes and James Gandolfini have appeared in Christopher Hampton's English translation, while Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster are set to star in a Roman Polanski-directed film version.

Those are big names for an apparently small scenario. Such is the price of popularity, though, that Reza has proven so successful as a satirist that not everyone takes her seriously. Here, like Alan Ayckbourne before her, is another writer who skewers the bourgeoisie, much to the delight of the bourgeoisie.

The Gate’s new production is not without its own celebrity wattage – ER’s Maura Tierney joins Ardal O’Hanlon, Owen Roe and Donna Dent – but Alan Stanford’s production will do best by finding real teeth in this farce of drunken disorder, domestic squabbling and emetic eruption. Woven between the broader gags are references to corrupt pharmaceutical companies and genocide in Darfur. In the right hands, Reza’s molehills can be properly seen as mountains.

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Connected Project Arts Centre, Dublin