Less than a month after the UK release of the film version of Yasmina Reza’s God Of Carnage comes a Québecois theatrical venture into Reza’s principal territory, the emptiness and even atavism of the affluent. When a play opens with a taped cue for a well-heeled thirtysomething couple to gush about how happy and fulfilled they are, you know that the next 90 minutes will lay bare the untruth of those claims. Peter and Mary are vaguely prosperous: her job is never specified, and as far as I can recall he is never even mentioned as having one. But they have a house with a pool, a baby who won’t stop crying and an adoption request pending for a Chinese girl, in the hope that she can play the piano where they currently hide liquor and (as is obvious to every nose in the small theatre) noxious herbal cigarettes pretending to be Marlboro Lights. When they invite a friend over to sever the friendship, he brings his new 21-year-old “fuck friend” with him; over an increasingly drunken evening (screw-top wine bottles for such folk? Really?) and its aftermath, we see the disintegration of Peter and Mary’s world, the yawning chasm between each of the two individuals and the hollow “we” of their coupledom.
    
Model Agyness Deyn makes her stage début as percipient young Paula, with a diffidence common among stage appearances by those famous for other reasons. She does not have the assurance to carry Paula’s keen insights, and on occasion cannot take a single step without adding the catwalk sashay, snapping her weight from hip to hip. But she is committed and assiduous. As Peter, Ed Stoppard is surprisingly shouty; one would think he would know better than to let rip in such intimate surroundings. John Schwab has more freedom to rollick as the divorced-and-loving-it Mark, and Melanie Gray takes the acting laurels as Mary, whose (often self-lacerating) fangs emerge as her blood-alcohol level rises. In the final analysis, though, these characters are neither who we are, who we could be nor who we wish we were. François Archambault’s play (in Bobby Theodore’s translation and Harry Burton’s production) looks too much like the products of the Reza atelier: it is a highly glazed artefact, fashionably decorative but, when you pick it up and test it in your grasp, oddly weightless.

Written for the Financial Times.