Art, Yasmina Reza’s precision-tooled entertainment in which three male friends
fall out over a painting, took up residence in the West End for more than
six years. There have been several more plays from the same pen, but none
ever looked as likely to press the same buttons as her latest. God of
Carnage reunites three architects of the first English-language production
of Art: Reza’s regular translator, Christopher Hampton; the director Matthew
Warchus; and Ken Stott, who is part of as stellar a cast as the West End has
seen in many years.
The premise that brings the four characters together is simple. In a Paris
playground, an 11-year-old boy has hit another boy in the face with a stick.
Alain and Annette, the culprit’s parents, played by Ralph Fiennes and Tamsin
Grieg, are visiting the apartment of Michel and Véronique, the victim’s
parents, played by Stott and Janet McTeer, to work out a way in which an
apology might be made. As attitudes to politics, work, money, conscience
and, crucially, hamsters are revealed, vast crevasses of disagreement open
up, not only between the two couples, but between husbands and wives. How
are the cast themselves getting along?
Could you sum up your characters as we find them at the start of the play?
Ken Stott:Michel is a self-made man, who has made his money with a
wholesale company, selling domestic goods. A practical man, I would say, and
that’s probably something Véronique found attractive - his grounded, earthy
quality.
Janet McTeer:Véronique is a writer, and she works with art and
photographs. She’s quite cultured and a hands-on mother. All her jobs
revolve around her family.
Tamsin Grieg:Annette is in wealth management, which she doesn’t
elaborate on and nobody asks.
JM:Because we don’t care. But she wears really nice shoes, so we know
she’s doing quite well.
Ralph Fiennes: Alain is a lawyer. I suppose he’s quite successful. You
quickly learn that he’s dealing with a crisis, defending a pharmaceutical
company that’s been selling a drug that may have bad side effects.
KS I don’t particularly like Michel. I wouldn’t want to be him. Which
does make me wonder why I was asked to play him.
RFI like Alain. I like his honesty.
JMNot very cuddly, is he?
RFHe might be.
JMHe really isn’t. But, in his defence, he’s the one parent who is
honest about the psychopathic tendencies of his son.
RFI think his son might be a bit disturbed, but how do you interpret
that? None of us has witnessed the act, none of us is exactly sure. It’s a
childish spat - that’s what happens with kids. He wants to move on. But
Véronique wants a metaphorical pound of flesh, exactly how she sees it
should finish. And it pisses him off.
To what extent do you actors debate the arguments of the play among
yourselves?
KSEndlessly. We spent pretty much two weeks doing just that. We do it
less now, simply because we are going to have to get on and do it. And, if
we sat around and really argued the toss about who was right, we would
probably disagree.
Who is right?
JMI am. Véronique is always right. It’s her greatest failing. As
Yasmina quite rightly said, Véronique is the character we would all like to
be. She’s the one who cares deeply about the adults children are going to
grow up to be. The only reason she becomes insufferable is that she’s making
a really big effort to turn this into something positive, and she’s not
listened to.
TGAll the characters are unheard. Nobody gives the other person time.
It’s an accurate assessment of where we’re at. There’s a real urge,
particularly in Véronique, to hear the word “sorry”, but nobody is willing
to say it out loud because of the litigious hand that hangs over everyone
now. They are held in this societal clamp of seeing what you can get away
with.
Has it come up in rehearsal that this could be seen as a microcosm of
America’s refusal to say sorry for Iraq?
KSNo, it hasn’t.
TGI remember thinking, when I first read the play, “Oh, well, this is
about the Middle East.” And I haven’t thought about it since, because I
don’t know enough about it. But there is that sense that this is bigger.
JMIt is exactly that point at a tiny level. You take two children
having a fight - who says sorry to whom, and whether they should or not -
and you blow that up to their parents and beyond that to any political
argument. We live in a therapy culture. Nobody is at fault. But if nobody’s
at fault, then nobody takes responsibility. Whether you take it on a tiny
scale or a vast scale, it’s the same principle.
[Fiennes’s phone rings, much as Alain’s does in the play.]
JMArt life, life art...
TGDon’t you want to take that?
JMAlain, could you join us, please?
RFSorry.
Is it possible that couples will leave the theatre wondering whether the
fault lines exposed in the play’s marriages hold up a mirror to their own
relationship?
JMSome people will come away going, “God, aren’t we lucky?” Other
people will come away in steely silence.
RFI think it would be good if people came out arguing. I think it
should disturb people.
TGWere you disturbed when you read it, Ralph?
RF Erm, yeah, but I laughed when I was disturbed. You laugh because
she strips the skin away, and there’s something in that that’s funny.
TGAnd I don’t think you can play it as a comedy. Matthew describes her
plays as “funny tragedies”. The playing of it has to be deadly serious.
JMIf you play it for laughs, you lose the play.
RFAny actor who’s played Hamlet will tell you that you get laughs. Not
intentionally. They just happen. Hamlet looks at the desperation of his
situation, and audiences just react with laughter at moments. We’re still
virgins here. In a funny way, I like not knowing where the laughs are.
There’s a thing that happens when audience reactions start to inevitably
shape the way you play it.
KSIt’s unavoidable. Even though we are saying it’s played absolutely
straight, we are also actors, and have to control an audience; and, in a
comedy, you control them by allowing them to laugh here and not allowing
them to laugh there.
JMSome of the laughter in this is not because it’s funny. It’s more
like recognition or nervousness. I bet there’ll be at least six laughs per
couple per show where one person goes “Ha ha ha!” and recognises either
themselves or their partner. And there’ll be a little ripple of [ whispering]
“You do that.”
KSAnd a lot of men with arms folded.
Has Yasmina Reza been a presence in the room?
RFThat’s been a big part of the rehearsals: her trying to participate
with Christopher on the translation, because there were some phrases and
sentences we all felt didn’t sit quite right as colloquial English. She was
strong on pressing that, in French, there is a succinctness in the way she
writes that she often felt English couldn’t offer her – even though I think
Christopher’s is a fantastic translation. So, we’ve been spending a lot of
time fine-tuning, nuancing little sentences, phrases, expressions.
TGThere’s a really bizarre thing that happens in translation where
French uses English. They say, “ Je n’ai pas le self-control.”
When you try to put it into English, it doesn’t mean “I have no
self-control”. You get this bizarre Chinese whispering of a phrase that
cannot be translated back into English. So it’s just trying to find the
emotional heart of a phrase.
How French is this play? The characters have French names, the incident
happens in a French park, they eat French food and they seem to have a
distinctly French type of obnoxiousness. It feels like a classic Alan
Ayckbourn scenario translated to the Rive Gauche.
JMShe’s way, way, way bleaker and more on the edge. There’s nothing
safe about what Yasmina writes. It might appear safe for about five minutes,
but that’s about it.
KSWe wanted to preserve the Frenchness of it, but it’s not uniquely
French, is it? It’s universal in terms of - for want of a better word -
class.
RFI like playing obnoxious people. I think the English can be just as
obnoxious. We’re not trying to play French types. It would be possible to
interchange names with English ones, and it would be the same.
TGIf you try to locate it in London, you immediately get a sense of
who somebody is from the park that they live near. And Yasmina didn’t want
it to be a play about social differences. She wanted it to be about people
not being able to talk to one another.
As each character reveals their feral side, it feels increasingly as if
there is another English source: Lord of the Flies.
TGThere is an element of that. Who is the god of carnage?
RFAs adults, we all know childish emotional frustrations are just
beneath the surface. We might have layers. Being grown-up is a practising of
all the layers to cover up the little child who’s still there.
JMWell, I’m definitely Piggy. That’s all I know.
Which one of you is the murderer?
KSOh, we all are.
God of Carnage is previewing at the Gielgud, W1
