Date
Sat 3 Oct to Sat 21 Nov
This event has finished
Cast
by Yasmina Reza, dir Gale Edwards, with Russell Dykstra, Marcus Graham, Sacha Horler, Helen Thomson.
Price
$30.00 to $85.00
Opening Times
Mon 6.30pm; Tue–Sat 8pm; Wed 1pm; Sat 2pm; Mon 12 Oct 8pm; Wed 28 Oct 12.15pm.
At
Sydney Opera House
Drama Theatre
Address
Bennelong Point
Sydney, 2000
Telephone
02 9250 7777
Related Links
Read Time Out's review.
It's a good thing Russell Dykstra knows something about French theatre. The Brisbane boy is playing Michel, a hardware wholesaler, in Sydney Theatre Company's God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, France's most-exported living playwright (Art, Life x3). In New York it won three Tony awards including Best Play in 2009; the London production starring Ralph Fiennes as a top-dog lawyer drew an Oliver Award for Best New Comedy.
"She actually refers to her plays as tragedies," Dykstra says, "yet it's incredibly funny. You make the audience laugh until they want to piss their pants. But come the end of the night everyone is exposed and it's got as ugly as it can get."
God of Carnage review
It's been a while since Sydney theatregoers have been invited to spend an evening with four such odious characters. Not since Belvoir's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has the spectacle of niceties dissolving and marriages fracturing under the agent of alcohol played out so fulsomely. One afternoon in Paris, Veronica and Michael Vallon (Sacha Horler and Russell Dykstra) are playing host to Annette and Alan Reille (Helen Thomson and Marcus Graham). It's a peace summit on a domestic scale: the parents' 11-year-old sons have just clashed in a playground, with the visitors' son, Ferdinand, having smashed out two teeth of the hosts' boy, Bruno.
At first the couples are polite and self-congratulatory on their maturity: "How many parents standing up for their children turn infantile themselves?" Annette says. And you can see where this is going. The adults are each in flight from their own true natures. Idealistic Veronica, who has written a book about Darfur, is all bourgeois hospitality, but filled with parental indignation. Michael pretends to be a left-wing intellectual when really he's a right-leaning soak who despises his kids. Annette's prim gentility is likewise a sham, while Alan, a lawyer for a dodgy pharmaceutical firm, doesn't even bother to hide his boredom and spends the meeting taking work calls on his mobile.
Barbarism begins at home, as the Smiths once sang. Are 'rational' adults any better than scuffling schoolboys? Conversely, is there something essentially honest about kids expressing their anger? Yasmina Reza's play reveals much about cycles of revenge and recrimination, especially when the alliances shift and this neighbourly battle mutates into a war between the sexes. (When Veronica and Michael learn that their son is the leader of his own gang, their reactions polarise into horror on her part and pride on his.)
There are plenty of laughs in Gale Edwards' production, but Sydney audiences may find it hard to believe these four people would remain in each other's company for 90 minutes - the French love of an intellectual argument for its own sake does not quite translate. The result is a play that's as cool and distant as the design of the Vallons' apartment - smart modern couches in visceral, bloody red. Another nice touch in Brian Thomson's design is the four piles of art books stacked at the front of the stage. Like the four antagonists, these teetering towers of civilised ideas are all too easily toppled, or stained with the vomit of our essential animal natures. And yes, there is a pivotal regurgitation sequence; call it a spew de theatre. Nick Dent
The play is set in Paris, where Dykstra went in his early twenties and trained in the schools of the French physical actors Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier. By 2008 he had won many accolades, including both the Sydney Theatre Critics Award and a Helpmann Award for best supporting actor for several roles in Michael Gow's Toy Symphony, ranging from the school bully to Anton Chekhov. He has graced the big screen in Romulus, My Father (2007), Lantana (2001) and Soft Fruit (1999), for which he won the AFI Award for Best Actor. It was delivered to him live on TV while he was performing in Molière's The Imaginary Invalid at the Ensemble Theatre: a TV crew barged on stage to present it. "Some of the audience thought that the production was just getting a bit clever," Dykstra recalls. "Then after my acceptance speech I had to keep going with the play. I felt really under the microscope then."
Despite the apocalyptic title, Reza's script calls for just two couples in a living room, where alcohol is consumed, not unlike Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Dykstra points out that Albee's classic is mainly about one dysfunctional marriage. "Here the couples are pretty evenly matched. No one is safe. The characters are almost archetypes in tradition of the commedia dell'arte. It's very much an actor's piece. We sit back in rehearsal enjoying each other's shtick."
Actors will never say a bad word about their own characters, but they often develop a keen appreciation of other characters' faults. Dykstra's antagonist in the play is a corporate lawyer, Alain, played by Marcus Graham with a mobile phone stuck in his hand. "He is one of those people you'd see in a public place talking inappropriately loudly and you think, 'What the fuck, there are other people here,' and what makes it extraordinary is that he's in our house! We're dealing with their child having hit our child and knocked out two teeth.
"Actually, both men are deeply disinterested, [thinking] why not let the kids sort it out with a couple of punches instead of us having to endure the women sitting around [going] yakety yak for 90 minutes? Alain works at a high level in a pharmaceutical company and sees this as fairly trivial. And it builds and builds, and eventually we see him collapse.
"It's an absolute crowd-pleaser." Jason Catlett
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