‘We are sensitive enough to believe in the pacifying powers of culture,” declares touchy-feely Véronique Vallon (Lia Williams), a writer on human rights issues in Africa. Oh Lord, she’s really in for it, you feel, even as you start to wonder whether that ‘we’ could properly be said to include her businessman husband Michel who is already starting to reveal himself as a bit of a brute.

The remark is addressed to their guests Alain and Annette Reille (Richard E. Grant, pictured, and Serena Evans), on a first visit to the stylish Paris apartment to discuss a playground assault in which their 11-year-old son Ferdinand has refashioned young Bruno Vallon’s teeth with a stick. Apology? Explanation? Excuses? Defiance? What is to be offered? That blood is going to be spilt – metaphorically at least – is one strong likelihood, since this is a play by Yasmina Reza (Art, Life x 3); that we are going to take a huge, if slightly guilty, pleasure in watching it flow is another.

Expectations are fulfilled. No blood is spilt, but Annette gets so angry she is sick. So far removed are the couples from an amicable settlement that, not long before the 90-minute drama’s end – by now revived with a hefty slug of Michel’s rum, which has done so much to loosen everyone’s inhibitions – Annette is screaming at Véronique: “My son did well to clout yours – and I wipe my arse on your charter of human rights.” Conciliatory, not.

Calmer, to be sure, than the missus, Alain nevertheless shares her view of ‘Ronnie’, whom he accuses of being a do-gooder in the Jane Fonda mould. The withering contempt Grant conveys through this utterance shows that the lawyer’s patience has at last snapped. A powerful contributory factor in this has been his exasperated wife’s plunging in a vase of tulips of his mobile phone, with which much dirty dealing in a drug company’s negligence claims over a new product’s side-effects had earlier been done.

Ongoing business involving this danger drug is one clever way Reza broadens the action beyond the obvious. Another concerns Michel’s shameful dumping to her death (he thought she’d relish her freedom) of the family’s pet hamster Nibbles. (The fate of this animal is oddly unsettling, its symbolic importance clear in this drama of lives restricted, as most are.) It is fascinating, too, to observe how the arguments, far from being two-sided, broaden to set all four people at each others’ throats at various times.

Wittily translated, as have been Resa’s earlier successes, by Christopher Hampton, and snappily directed once again by Mathew Warchus, this is a delightful and diverting piece, which first played to huge success in London last year. With the new quartet of top-class performers now settling into their roles, the production continues on its tour (including Milton Keynes Theatre from March 24-28) before moving into the West End later in the year.

God of Carnage is at the Everyman Theatre until Saturday. Box office: 01242 572573 9 (www.everymantheatre.org.uk).