This play is about hypocrisy of the middle-class kind. The well-meaning parents of two children are brought together after a playground punch up. One boy has smacked the other boy's teeth out with a stick and the idea is that a civilised discussion of the implications will be a good example for the antagonistic kids. It isn't. The civilised veneer of the two couples starts to peel almost immediately and, by the end of the play, everyone has turned on everyone, someone has been sick on someone's art books, someone else has been punched in the face, a hamster has been lost forever and a Blackberry has taken an unwanted dip in the tulip bowl.
       This is the second coming for God of Carnage which premiered at the Gielgud last year, picking up an Olivier Award for best new comedy. It was ten years since the French writer Yasmina Reza brought the long-running Art to London and this production unites the successful team behind it - Christopher Hampton who translated the play, Mathew Warchus who directed it and the designer Mark Thompson. Unsurprisingly expectations ran high, people liked Art for its tight dialogue, for its humour, for its philosophical underbelly and for the fact that they could get out of the theatre with enough time for a good dinner. It ran for over six years in London and God of Carnage strives for the same. Ralph Fiennes, Janet Mcteer, Tamsin Greig and Ken Stott opened with the play last year, and here it is back again, in Richmond this time with a cast lead by Richard E Grant.
       Grant plays the 11-year-old aggressor's father: a chauvinistic lawyer who happily concedes his son is a savage and barricades himself behind his newspaper and the constant interruption of his mobile phone. Lia Williams plays Veronique, the victim's mother. The get-together is her idea, she's an art-loving liberal writing a book on the crisis in Darfur. Serena Evans is the wife of the lawyer and the mother of the boy with the stick and, initially at least, she finds common cause with Veronique as they mutually advertised their civility. Roger Allam is Veronique's assiduously polite husband Michel whose mask soon slips to expose a morally-retarded misanthrope who hates his wife and resents his children. Let the pantomime begin.
       This set up is a great recipe for tension and there are rueful and savage laughs aplenty in this play, with Richard E Grant thoroughly enjoyable as the yuppie demon. Lia Williams is believable as the right-on middle-class bleeding heart, full of self satisfied ideas about how to save the world. One can imagine that her husband might become a little bent by the force of her unremitting optimism and we can accept that being married to Grant's relentless machismo would be enough to make any wife sick. But we have been in this territory before and Reza's play pales in comparison to Edward Albee or Alan Ayckbourne in its quest to expose the chilling emptiness and fragility of modern manners. Darfur is brought into the play to hover over the action as a dark signifier of bloodier battles beyond the playground, and the four parents gathered in the suburban sitting-room are analogous to combatants embroiled in the torturous manoeuvres of attempting to resolve much deeper conflicts. But this is a heavy weight to bear and the narrow shoulders of this play mean that for all the efforts of the cast they cannot carry it off. The jokes are there, and there is some shocking dialogue but it is a play you want to boo or cheer and if you are expecting more than a middle class pantomime it's a bit of a disappointment. Nevertheless, at just over an hour and a quarter there's still enough time for a good dinner after the curtain drops.
Charlie Taylor