God of Carnage: Yasmina Reza returns to the OLT with her award-winning critique of the middle class
Photo: Maria Vartanova
By Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton; Ottawa Little Theatre ; Directed by Chantale Plante
At one point in Yasmina Reza’s incisive, award-winning comedy about social hypocrisy, a father comments that his 11-year-old son is “a savage”.
The savage behaviour in question is a playground fight in which he hit another boy with a stick, breaking two of the other child’s teeth.
Now, the two sets of parents are meeting to discuss the incident. The initial awkwardness, punctuated by long pauses, is soon replaced by increasingly uncivil and uncivilized behaviour revealing the insincerity and ugliness in the married couples’ relationships with each other and with their opposite numbers.