Der Gott des Gemetzels

Two 11-year-old boys get into a fight in the park; one of them is hit with a stick and loses his two front teeth. Nothing dramatic, really. Among civilised people such as their parents, these things are settled – including insurance questions, of course – in a face-to-face meeting over espresso and home-baked goods. So Alain and Annette meet up with Véronique and Michel to discuss the right educational approach to take with the children, in as consensual and politically correct a manner as appropriate in our Western societies today. The admission of guilt is quickly typed out. After a few minutes, everything seems to be amicably settled. A quick coffee follows, a drop of alcohol, and the little mishap is over. But then things drag on, more and more. A few comments here, a few “yes, well” remarks there, one sentence leads to another, and the peaceful afternoon family get-together suddenly spirals out of control.

Which of the two boys was actually to blame? Doesn’t Ferdinand’s rowdy behaviour point to marital problems between Alain and Annette? Which is worse: that the highly strung Annette vomits all over Véronique’s art books, or that Véronique is much more concerned about her books than the well-being of her guest? That Michel abandoned his daughter’s hamster outside, or that Alain is giving legal advice to a pharmaceutical company about a drug with hazardous side effects? And doing so constantly, on his mobile phone, very loud and clear. Which only stokes the nervous tension. Before long, all moral constraints dissolve. Jibes explode into rows, verbal attacks into fisticuffs. And suddenly these four respectable adults find themselves in the thick of it – in a blazing row about their own shortcomings. And their positions and coalitions keep changing. It gets louder and louder. And funnier. With diabolical humour and merciless accuracy, Yasmina Reza’s play skewers contemporary bourgeois society, which is torn between enlightened reason and all-too-human, selfish competitiveness. As obliging and mellow as we may pretend to be, in the end one thing prevails: the god of carnage.

Yasmina Reza, born in 1959, is a writer, director and actress and the most frequently performed contemporary playwright. Among her works published in German by Carl Hanser Verlag are Glücklich die Glücklichen (novel, 2014), Babylon (novel, 2017), for which she won the Prix Renaudot in 2016, Kunst (play, 2018), DER GOTT DES GEMETZELS (play, 2018), Bella Figura (play, 2019), Drei Mal Leben (play, 2019), Anne-Marie die Schönheit (novel, 2019), Serge (novel, 2022) and James Brown trug Lockenwickler (play, 2023). She was most recently honoured for her work with the 2020 Jonathan Swift Prize, the 2021 Premio Malaparte, the Prix de l’Académie de Berlin in 2022 and the Prix Mondial Cino del Duca in 2024. In 2011, the play DER GOTT DES GEMETZELS was made into the highly successful film CARNAGE by Roman Polanski, featuring an all-star cast with Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly.