Der Gott des Gemetzels (The God of Slaughter)

The bourgeois world of Yasmina Reza is governed by the Code Civil. For the time being. But its civilized outer skin is easily cast off and beneath it pulses raw flesh: a small or a last great truth. The mechanics of the play may be easily seen through, the enlightenment of two married couples and their violent sons is itself enlightening but this does nothing to detract from the beauty of the its construction, which leads to all of the participants being exposed and humiliating themselves. At the end the stage looks like Gosch’s Düsseldorf “Macbeth”; destroyed. Common sense has been annihilated. Reza’s conversational play uses all the rules of comedy to show not so much a regression into barbarism as the fact that protective mechanisms do not work, nothing counts any more, nothing works any more. Not the solidarity of gender or identifying with your partner, not cultural achievement, social activity or politically correct behaviour, not the language of concern and community. Gosch guides the catastrophe quartet with relentless precision, carelessly intelligent and shamelessly funny, with a calmly nonchalant attitude towards the text and its anthropological constants as ultimately there is nothing really to reveal.