Theatre review: God of Carnage

I hadn't initially booked for the Lyric Hammersmith's revival of God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's follow-up to "Art" - I'd seen the original West End production of Christopher Hampton's translation, and remembered not being particularly fussed by it. A great cast made the difference when it was announced, and got me back to Reza's other story of insufferably upper-middle class people having a meltdown in a joylessly chic living room. Ladies and Gentlemen: The French. We're in Veronica (Freema Agyeman) and Michael Novak's (Martin Hutson) flat, where they're hosting Alan (Ariyon Bakare) and Annette Raleigh (Dinita Gohil) for the afternoon. The Raleighs' 11-year-old son Ferdinand has hit the Novaks' son Bruno with a bamboo cane in the school playground, knocking out two of his teeth.

Theatre review: "Art"

Florian Zeller is the French playwright who's all the rage in London at the moment, but in the nineties that title belonged firmly to Yasmina Reza. A few of her plays got West End runs but it was "Art" that brought her to public attention and became a big hit. Matthew Warchus' production ran for eight years, its gimmick of replacing the three-strong cast every couple of months keeping it in the public eye and ticket sales going strong. With Warchus now in charge of the Old Vic he's seen an opportunity to revive the play for its 20th anniversary. In fact he may well be said to be reviving the same production - I saw that twice, with one of the early cast changes at Wyndhams* and then a few years later when it had moved to the Whitehall Theatre (before it became Trafalgar Studios.) And though it's been a while this feels familiar: The latest trio to play the 40-something men who've been friends for 15 years are Rufus Sewell, Tim Key and Paul Ritter.