God of Carnage

This Tony award winning play by Yazmina Reza would be a test for any amateur group but Banbury Cross Players rose to the challenge as usual, presenting the piece as a one-act single scene piece, which worked really well.

So the scene is one set, four characters, little in the way of a plot, massive parts for the actors.
Four parents meet to discuss a school playground incident involving their sons, where one has hit the other with a stick, knocking out several teeth.
They meet at the home of Michel and his wife Veronique, parents of the playground victim. I’m not quite sure why the play was set in France it could have been anywhere, but I digress, the play begins.

What I took to be a rather slow pace at the start with Veronique being very quiet and softly spoken was a deliberate ploy as the play progressed and speeded up until its climax when mayhem was the order of the day.

The set was simple, perhaps too simple, lacking a little in homely warmth with a single plain wall and no rug on the stage floor.
The piece also could have used a little more movement, after all the stage area is a good size, and there was a good deal of the cast standing and sitting in a line, plus the occasional blocking, details that should have been sorted in rehearsal.

Although the play is quite short, just 1½ hours, the parts were huge and full credit must go to all four actors, especially on this, the first night, if there was a prompt, I didn’t spot it.

Rob Hall came over well as Michel, the rather drab retailer who becomes less and less likeable as the play goes on, and Helena played her part just as convincingly as the frumpy wife.

Frumpy, Tara Lacey certainly wasn’t as Annette, the glamorous support act to her successful lawyer husband Alain. She was believable in this complex roller coaster part that went from timid nervousness to all action hero as she rips Alain’s mobile phone away from its constant resting place, i.e. his ear, and tosses it into a vase of water. The scene where Annette actually vomited was done to perfection, and I am still trying to work out how they did it.

The mood changes after Michel brings out his prized bottles of 15-year-old rum. By now it is clear the playground incident is not going to be resolved and Veronique soon changes from dowdy to vamp as she swigs from the bottle and drapes herself over Alain.

The tone of the meeting along with the language disintegrates quickly and Veronique continues her metamorphosis from mouse to super-rat as she berates everyone present still guzzling the precious bottle of rum.

Philip Fine as Annette’s lawyer husband Alain was excellent and admirably got on everyone’s nerves for forever being on his mobile phone, until Annette does her stuff much to her husband’s chagrin but to the delight of the rest of the cast and indeed to the audience.

It’s unfair to pick out any of the players as ‘man of the match’ as it were, as all rose to the occasion and the Director, Terry Gallager, picked his cast well contrasting the homely Michel and Veronique well with the sharp-suited lawyer and his trophy wife.

Though not a comedy there were some great comedic lines and I am still wondering whether Michel slipping on Annette’s vomit was deliberate or an accident.

As the play ends we hear the two boys again in the playground making up and solving their differences, something their parents were clearly unable to do. Nice touch.

All in all another ‘must see’ from BCP. Cracking entertainment.

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