God of Carnage 
Lyric, Hammersmith 

 
YAZMINA REZA’s God of Carnage was first performed in Britain at the Gielgud Theatre in 2008, garnering excellent reviews and awards. Now, after a Broadway run and productions around the world, it’s back in London. 
 
Using Christopher Hampton’s sensitive translation from the original French and with a strong, fresh cast of four actors giving it everything they’ve got, this Hammersmith production milks Reza’s one-act verbal farce for all it’s worth, exaggerating and distorting its characters’ traits and faults to comedic effect. 
 
Lily Arnold’s chic, metropolitan front-room set, with its clear glass coffee table, art books and sleek sculpture, is the perfect calm counterpoint to the chaos that unfolds as two well-to-do couples, supposedly as sophisticated as the surroundings in which they meet, get together to try to resolve a fracas that has occurred between their two 11-year-old sons.  
 
What should be a relatively simple matter with a straightforward conclusion descends into a vitriolic encounter of wild rage and despair that goes well beyond the issue at hand, not only pitting the couples against each other but against themselves and, for good measure, setting the men up against the women, and vice versa. 
 
It’s a bleak, misanthropic scene that delivers plenty of humour throughout — though more in the nature of rueful chuckles than belly laughs.  
 
With Freeman Agyeman playing the prime promoter of the carnage, Veronica, at a high-octane level, each of the actors takes her lead, hamming it up quite deliberately to create a frenzied, strung out atmosphere that gets progressively more entertaining as the civility disappears and the hostility, fuelled by immoderate consumption of rum, begins to take over. 
 
It’s not kitchen sink reality — the characters are hardly believable in their self-absorbed, to-and-fro, manic attitudes and posturings — but that’s not the idea. God of Carnage pokes fun at our capacity for deliberate misunderstanding and at humanity’s inability to get so many of the simple things right. It’s frightening, really, but funny too. 
 
Runs until 30 September 2023. Box Office: 020 8741 6850, lyric.co.uk