Le dieu du Carnage

by Yasmina Reza

translation Laura Frausin Guarino and Ena Marchi

directed by Antonio Zavatteri

cast Francesca Agostini (Annette Reille); Andrea Di Casa (Michel Houlliè); Alessia Giuliani (Veronique Houlliè); Antonio Zavatteri (Alain Reille)

set and lighting design Nicolas Bovey

costumes Anna Missaglia

assistant director Bruno Ricci

production Teatro Nazionale di Genova

Yasmina Reza's hilarious and ferocious play — awarded the 2009 Laurence Olivier Award for best comedy and the Tony Award for best play of the year — portrays a bourgeois Parisian interior where “an atmosphere of composure, cordiality and tolerance reigns”, one that soon sours, veering into raw and ferocious tones. Two couples of newly acquainted parents meet to resolve, as the civilised adults they believe themselves to be, a matter they initially intend to play down: a quarrel that broke out in the park between their eleven-year-old sons. But, little by little, the masks of benevolence, tolerance, good manners, political correctness, open-mindedness and moral rectitude crumble. And beneath those masks appears the grin of the savage, dark deity that has governed us since the dawn of time: the god of carnage, indeed. Reza builds a brilliant psychodrama, handing the spectator a distorting mirror in which to discover, not without acid embarrassment, something that concerns them very closely.

Permission granted by Thaleia Productions, 6 rue sedillot 75007 Paris France. The Italian text Il dio del massacro, from Le dieu du Carnage by Yasmina Reza (2006), is published in Italy by Adelphi, Piccola Biblioteca (2011; new edition 2022)