Behaving well gets you nowhere. Read more …
When two young boys get into an altercation at a public park, their parents meet to discuss the event in a calm and rational manner…But as the evening progresses (and the rum is drunk), diplomatic civility makes way for all out conflict, leaving liberal principles, expensive flowers and half-digested food in tatters on the floor.
Winner of the Tony Award for Best New Play and Olivier Award for Best Comedy (2009), God of Carnage is a brutally entertaining and stingingly comic character study of middle class pretence and savage parental instinct.
God Of Carnage is a fantastic social commentary with outstanding performances from its four cast members. Hilarious at points and completely horrifying at others, God Of Carnage makes for an excellent evening of satire.
God of Carnage is foremost a comedy, but it also remains relevant as a satire, perhaps particularly in the sense of cultural and racial superiority that lurks beneath the surface in all the characters, as evidenced by their use of the fundamentally colonial concepts of “civilised” and “savage” to describe their own behaviour.
Reza's play may be almost a decade old, but in its up-close dissection of human frailty, it channels similar extremes to a more recent wave of dark dramas dressed up as sit-coms such as Fleabag and Catastrophe. This in itself points to how mainstream comic writing has grown up in its willingness to focus so unflinchingly on such discomforting behaviour.
Their antics make for an engaging, mostly compelling, if almost instantly forgettable, evening.
Delivers a hilarious, beautifully-pitched 80 minutes of theatre, full of sharp observation and hard-hitting comedy.
Gareth Nicholls’s production takes a decisively light approach.
God of Carnage is great, stylish fun, but ultimately as forgettable as a playground spat.
God of Carnage is an exacting and enjoyable dissection of bourgeois veneer and wandering morals.
Most of the cast cope well with the two-dimensionality of their characters and the demands of slapstick timing.
Gareth Nicholls--God of Carnage
Tron Theatre, Glasgow from Thursday March 9, 2017, until Saturday March 25, 2017. More info: www.tron.co.uk
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