Nine Years Theatre finds menace and fun in flawed source material God Of Carnage

A pair of middle-class couples come together to talk about their sons' playground fight. Read more at straitstimes.com.

Nine Years Theatre Ngee Ann Kongsi TheatreMarch 20, 8pm

A play about how shaky the foundations of civilisations are is of course particularly to the point now.

But at just 90 minutes, French playwright Yasmina Reza’s 2008 play God Of Carnage, with its sharp, projectile vomit-and-rum-fuelled descent into madness, has always strained credulity.

Her tale of a pair of middle-class couples radically misbehaving in a misplaced attempt to solve their two sons’ fight has a fundamental ridiculousness to it, and might be more easily played as a comedy of manners, though Reza is in fact much more earnest and serious.

This version by Nine Years Theatre directed by Nelson Chia in Mandarin manages to give it a good go by resolutely accepting its realism and maintaining a degree of restraint, playing the barbs just malicious enough.

Reza never quite manages the fluency and wit of more accomplished writers of inter-couple tension like Edward Albee and Tom Stoppard, but her provocations are as timely as ever in the able hands of this actor quartet. How much of people’s supposed values and behaviour are sheer pretence? And knowing this, is it really better to just drop the act?