About the Play:

Winner of Best Play at the 2009 Tony Awards and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2009

God of Carnage is a full-length comedy by Yasmina Reza, translated with elegance and élan by Christopher Hampton. Following a playground fight between two boys, their parents meet to discuss the incident. But a rational discussion among adults quickly devolves into a childish evening of name-calling, tears and tantrums. God of Carnage is a social comedy that unmasks the savagery lurking beneath urbane civilization.

God of Carnage is a comedy of manners without the manners. What happens when two sets of parents meet up to deal with the unruly behaviour of their children? A calm and rational debate between grown-ups about the need to teach ids how to behave properly? Or a hysterical night of name-calling, tantrums and tears before bedtime? Boys will be boys, but the adults are usually worse – much worse. In The God of Carnage, a sharp-edged comedy by French playwright Yasmina Reza, a playground altercation between eleven-year-old boys brings together two sets of Brooklyn parents for a meeting to resolve the matter. At first, diplomatic niceties are observed, but as the meeting progresses, and the rum flows, tensions emerge and the gloves come off, leaving the couples with more than just their liberal principles in tatters.

Christopher Hampton's translation of The God of Carnage premiered in 2008 at the Gielgud Theatre in London and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy – the ultimate standard in British playwriting. A Broadway production opened in 2009 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in New York City and won the Tony Award for Best Play. The play is regularly performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Elegant, acerbic and entertainingly fueled on pure bile. It's Reza's sharpest work since 'Art'." — Variety

"[A] streamlined anatomy of the human animal … delivers the cathartic release of watching other people's marriages go boom. A study in the tension between civilized surface and savage instinct, this play is itself a satisfyingly primitive entertainment." — New York Times

"Reza holds the mirror up to bourgeois hypocrisy with the savage indignation of a born satirist." — The Guardian

"…an expert piece of stagecraft, and savagely funny." — The International Herald Tribune

"Reza has established herself as a master [of] magnificently constructed plays ." — Entertainment Weekly

"A triumph! Brilliantly translated by Christopher Hampton." — Daily Express

"Brutally entertaining … in another of Christopher Hampton's exquisite translations, [Reza] cannily manipulates social observations that appeal to vast audiences and creates characters that bring out the best in actors." — New York Newsday

About the Playwright:

Yasmina Reza is a French playwright and novelist whose works have all been multi-award-winning, critical, and popular international successes. Her plays Conversations After a Burial, The Passage of Winter, 'Art', The Unexpected Man, Life x 3, and A Spanish Play have been produced worldwide and translated into thirty-five languages. L'aube le soir ou la nuit (Dawn Dusk or Night), her memoir about a year with Nicolas Sarkozy, was an enormous success in France and was also released in the United States.

Christopher Hampton is a British playwright, screenwriter, director, producer, and a consummate translator and adaptor of novels. He is perhaps most famous for his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses (based on the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos), which won an Olivier Award in 1986. He adapted the play for film and won an Oscar for the screenplay. His theatre work includes the stage adaptation of Sunset Boulevard for Andrew Lloyd Webber, which received Tony Awards for both Book and Lyrics. He has translated a wide range of works including classics by Chekhov, Ibsen and Moliere as well as contemporary plays by Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller. His long list of screenplays includes A Doll's House, The Good Father, Total Eclipse, and The Quiet American.