Yasmina Reza, Le Dieu du carnage
Our Reading Journey
Two Paris couples sit down in a living room to settle, amicably, a matter between their eleven-year-old sons: Ferdinand hit Bruno with a stick in a public square, and Bruno lost two teeth. Véronique and Michel are the injured party; Annette and Alain are the parents of the boy who swung the stick. Everyone is civil. There is coffee, a clafouti, and a carefully worded joint statement about the incident that both sets of parents review line by line. Within the hour, none of that civility survives.
The four adults left alone in that room turn out to have very little in common beyond their children. Alain defends pharmaceutical companies before the International Criminal Court; Véronique writes about Darfur and keeps art books on her coffee table. The group found in this contrast an echo of Bourdieu's two competing forms of capital, economic and cultural, and noticed that neither protects anyone here: Alain's money buys him nothing when his son actually needs him, and Véronique's culture doesn't stop her anger from turning into something close to a private courtroom, with Ferdinand as the defendant. The play was read alongside Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, and the pairing isn't accidental. Reza builds the same collapse Molière does, a surface of manners giving way to what it was covering, though here the vernis is called civility rather than nobility. Rum helps it along. So does a hamster nobody quite knows what to do with, neither wild nor tame, which is more or less the condition of the four people arguing over it.
About the Author
Yasmina Reza was born in Paris in 1959 to an Iranian Jewish engineer and a Hungarian violinist, trained at the École Jacques Lecoq, and worked as an actress before turning to playwriting in the early 1980s. Her 1987 debut, Conversations après un enterrement, won the Molière for best female author, and "Art" (1994) made her an international name, running in more than forty countries and winning the Tony, the Evening Standard Award, and the Laurence Olivier Award. Le Dieu du carnage was written in 2005 and 2006, opened in Zurich in German, reached Paris later that year in a production starring Isabelle Huppert, and won three Molières in 2008. Its Broadway run won the Tony for Best Play, and in 2011 Roman Polanski adapted it into the film Carnage, with Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet.
