Countess Cora’s hit yuppie war
God Of Carnage (Theatre Royal Bath) Verdict: PC-skewering fun Dance Nation (Almeida Theatre) Verdict: Sit this one out
Still widely known as Cora Crawley in tV’s Downton Abbey, Elizabeth McGovern is on cracking comic form in a fine Bath revival of Yasmina Reza’s God Of Carnage.
What a play it is: 80 minutes that pierce the hides of its four ageing yuppies. Merciless. Salty. Devastatingly true.
lindsay Posner’s production is top-class stuff, well cast and performed like quick tennis. Miss McGovern plays fussy, politically correct Veronica, a metropolitan whose 11-year- old son has been attacked by a classmate. We never see the boys.
the whole play is set in Veronica’s chic drawing room where she and her more roughroundthe- edges husband Michael (Nigel lindsay) are talking to the parents of their son’s attacker.
there follows a classic encounter of modern manners, initially awkward but polite as the two sets of parents try to establish whether Freddy now realises he was wrong to have whacked Henry and broken two of his teeth.
But Freddy’s father ( Ralf little) is a lawyer, and therefore twitchy about any acceptance of blame. the ruffian’s mother (Amanda Abbington) is ‘ in wealth management’ and has a similarly keen sense of reputational damage.
One loose word here, one casual phrase there, and the parents are soon sparring like warring corporates, their earlier politeness yielding to brutal (sometimes sweary) insults. Playwright Reza tears into the affectations, petty cruelties, vanities and sheer awfulness of so many modern professionals. When not attacking the other couple, these marrieds fight one another, exposing marital infelicities, gender tensions, coded political messages and long-simmering resentments. One moment the dads are squaring up to each other. the next they are allies against the women. You don’t know whether to laugh or shield your eyes. the four actors make this show a joy. Miss McGovern shows a terrific gift for comedy. Mr lindsay’s Michael, bluff and blowy, is the perfect foil. Miss Abbington’s Annette has a projectile eruption and Mr little’s Alan is a cocktail of guile and greed, constantly answering his mobile. if you have started to despair at modern British theatre’s pathetic failure to skewer the 21st century’s moneyed elite, this refreshing French modern classic shows how it should be done.
MORE predictably, North london’s Almeida (a nest of the sort of people satirised by Reza) is staging a politicised, badly acted, badly directed, faintly seedy American play.
Dance Nation tells the story of some schoolgirl ballet dancers (played by adults).
We’re talking sub-teen girls, here, yet this Arts Councilfunded theatre revels in scenes where the language is frequently foul and the content occasionally sexual, with nudity.
in any properly meritocratic world, this rubbish would likely never have been staged, let alone won prizes. But who needs merit when you receive a fat Arts Council grant?