CONTRARY to what the promotional pictures suggest, “God of Carnage” is not about food or eating – that disgusting mess is a metaphor for what director Jordan Best calls “the savage mess beneath”.

Written by celebrated French playwright Yasmina Reza, “Carnage” is the second Reza play in Canberra this year, after “Art” was performed at The Street in September. 

It’s a comedy that rips off the thin veneer of civility to reveal what savages we all are at heart. 

Playing at The Q, Queanbeyan later this month, it opens as two sets of parents meet to discuss an incident where Alan and Annette’s son has hit Michael and Veronica’s son in the face with a stick.

Reza’s plays are within the rich tradition of French farce, full of absurdities and near-staccato dialogue. “God of Carnage” gets nasty very quickly and is more “a comedy of manners… without the manners”.

I meet the entire cast with Jordan Best and her assistant director Callum Doherty, whose brains she is picking, for a freewheeling chat and find all of them eager to remind me that the show is funny, describing it as “a farce of delightful proportions” and “an absolute hoot, with one laugh after another”.

Maybe, but the 2009 Tony Award-winning play is telling us something about ourselves, too.

“Adults, behaving like children, like all manners are gone,” says Best. 

“A race to the bottom,” says Caroline Eccles, who plays Veronica. 

Lainie Hart, who plays Annette, points out that one truth in this comedy is that, even if you try to be civil it doesn’t mean you haven’t brought into the room the baggage of the day.

Best is adamant that there is a universal quality to Reza’s play and though French, it’s been translated into English by Christopher Hampton in such a way as to be universal.

“This could happen anywhere in the world… but it certainly shows how far the French are prepared to go,” she says.

She’s set it vaguely in Australia, but says it’s a universal story about a particular class of people, where certainly the home truths come out, but it’s done economically, with nothing superfluous.

”You know these people, but it doesn’t mean they’re fully finished. They’re still comedy characters painted with a broad brush, which is why we laugh. And it’s a sitcom,” she says.

Eccles, best known as a physical-theatre artist, a talent which comes to bear in creating a hilarious farce, says performing in such a verbal play “is really different for me”. 

Veronica, she says, is a writer, about to release a self-published book on the Darfur genocide in Western Sudan. Highly strung, she has a very considerable opinion of herself.

Her husband Michael, played by Josh Wiseman, is a successful, blue-collar company director who indulges his wife.

Hart’s character Annette is a lifestyle stylist, wealth manager, management expert for whom parenting has come at a great price, hard work not having been part of the plan.

Seasoned comic actor Jim Adamik, plays her husband Alan, a high-profile lawyer, very sure of his own importance and certain that parenting is a mother’s job. 

The stage is set for a comic disaster. 

Wiseman says Reza’s focus is on the relationships, so he thinks the play will be very accessible to parents who may have been in such encounters. 

How do you reach out? Are you the kind of parent who says: “Oh, my child wouldn’t have done that” or are you the kind that might say: “Do you know what, maybe?” The children can become the pawns in a protective game.

Hart says that as one couple might look for retribution and the other for reconciliation, the audience members will variously side with different people, and it might get them questioning themselves.

“The play gets wild at the end,” Best says. “But it’s very, very funny. There’s no great big message, it tells the story and it honours the playwright.” 

“God of Carnage,” The Q, November 23-26.