Review: God of Carnage

ell, God of Carnage:  it is nice to finally meet you in the flesh.  Your reputation precedes you.

They almost look pleasant. Set by Morag Cook. Photo by Matt Nettheim

I read a lot of reviews: because I’m just generally interested in theatre, because there are many reviewers I enjoy simply as writers (my current blog roll, right, needs to be updated to reflect all the bloggers I currently read), and because it is part of my “education”, if you will, in improving myself as a critic.  So when Yazmina Reza’s God Of Carnage has played on the West End in 2008, and on Broadway and three separate productions in Australia in 2009, I have taken in many a review.

It is an oft mentioned criticism of the script that it needs a strong cast to carry it, and this is accompanied by “so it is a good thing they found a cast so strong”, or “so the script tends to fall down when…” Since that is considered such knowledge, it is then remarkable that I never even thought, “it’s a good thing we have such a good cast”, for indeed when this cast, under Michael Hill’s direction, really bite into the heightened reality, the cracks which others mentioned failed to show.