An 11-year-old kid knocks out the two front teeth of another with a stick in a schoolboy brawl. Their parents meet with high hopes for mutual pacification. But high-minded cordiality and civility in the house soon get thrown out the window. Verbal boxing matches follow, fractured rifts in marriages show and individual contradictions bubble to the surface. An ugly free-for-all ensues: no one is exempt from infantile behavior and banal accusations.In other words? Ah, humans.Adapted for a Cantonese theatrical staging in Hong Kong last August to much fanfare, Dionysus Contemporary Theatre finally transported its high-voltage production, God of Carnage, beyond Hong Kong shores to Singapore this month. The two-show run took place last weekend as part of The Esplanade's Huayi Festival.Featuring a stellar ensemble cast with big names like Anthony Wong, Louisa So, Poon Chan Leung and Olivia Yan (who co-directed the production with Fong Chun Kit), this was one taut and entertaining adaptation of French playwright Yasmina Reza's critically acclaimed black comedy… for the most part, anyway.There were times when the slapstick schtick was piled on a tad too thickly, rendering it close to off-putting. From Olivia Yan's Anna stamping her feet in indignation like a child throughout the last half of the play, to a tediously long drawn-out scene of Anthony Wong's Michael gingerly laying out kitchen towels to soak up vomit from the living room floor, these times are thankfully spread out far and between.Reza's satirical play has long been a stage darling since it picked up the Laurence Olivier Award in 2008 with its London's West End premiere starring Ralph Fiennes. In 2009 it won the Tony Award as it hit Broadway with the likes of Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and the late James Gandolfini. Even Roman Polanski has eyed it for the silver screen, adapting it for his 2011 film Carnage.Scathing commentary about domesticity aside, this particular staging by Dionysus Contemporary Theatre proved to be especially intriguing for its updated subtext on the ongoing Hong Kong-China conflict.Read between the lines, and the blink-and-miss-it reference of a pet hamster "made to disappear" by Wong's Michael, for instance, calls to mind the recent controversial disappearance of five booksellers in Hong Kong connected to the selling and publishing of books banned in mainland China.One gets the sense, too, that as Michael poignantly launches into a heated tirade of words ("I find it incomprehensible to be called a killer! In my own home!") to defend himself against his wife and guests, the enraged man isn't merely trying to re-assert his dominance over his peers as the head of the house.He might well be the personification for a certain populous country in the world.
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