Der Gott des Gemetzels
('God of Carnage')
by Yasmina Reza
An 'evening with the parents' takes an unexpectedly furious turn: two married couples who find themselves hopelessly drawn into a dog-eat-dog fight as they attempt to calm down a serious argument between their sons and soon find themselves drowning in a torrent of disagreements, excuses and aggressions. The facade of middle class good manners crumbles, and breaks down entirely at the end of the evening. Things get embarrassingly out of hand, precisely because it is all just a facade. Nothing is right between the protagonists, neither between the supposedly cultivated couples nor within the relationships.
Yasmina Reza specialises in conflicts between couples, and masterfully describes the kind of minor but wide-reaching disasters people get themselves into when the facade of their civilised cohabitation comes crashing down. In a ridiculous verbal battle, the collapse of the conventions reveals in a tragic, but also comical way the true emotional state of a would-be elite that needs only the slightest provocation to say goodbye to all decency and consideration. The God of Carnage strikes relentlessly. A brilliant 'quartet of hypocrites', as bitter as they are funny, played by a perfect quartet of actors, Margarita Broich, Maria Schrader, Samuel Finzi and Wolfram Koch.
Margarita Broich, well-known to TV audiences not only as an inspector in the Frankfurt-based episodes of the long-running TV crime series Tatort, regularly appears on all of the great stages in the German-speaking countries. Her performances in Hermine Huntgeburth's film adaptation of Effi Briest and Oskar Röhler's Sources of Life were utterly memorable. She currently also stars in the TV channel ARD series Meine Mutter. Margarita Broich not only studied drama, but also photographic design; her works are repeatedly being shown in successful exhibitions.
The actress, screenwriter and director Maria Schrader has won numerous prizes. Her film Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe won the People's Choice award at the European Film Awards, and was nominated for an Oscar in the category 'Best Foreign Language Film'. She won a Primetime Emmy for the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox. In 2021, Maria Schrader's film I'm Your Man won in several categories at the German Film Awards; her 2022 film She Said premiered at the New York Film Festival.
Samuel Finzi, who was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1966, is a theatre actor, and has also appeared in over 150 film productions. Celebrated by the press, as well as by audiences, he has won prizes for his outstanding work, for example the accolade Actor of the Year, the Deutscher Schauspielpreis, which is awarded by actors to actors, and the Gertrud-Eysoldt-Ring prize. He has appeared at the Schauspiel Frankfurt theatre, at the Burgtheater in Vienna, at the Deutsches Theater and at the Volksbühne in Berlin, and has also participated in audio drama productions.
Wolfram Koch first appeared in a film at the age of only thirteen, the dramatisation of Heinrich Böll's The Clown, but then decided to focus on the theatre. He regularly performs on many of the German-speaking countries' stages, appearing most recently at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Schauspiel Frankfurt theatre, for example. in 2014, he and Samuel Finzi jointly won the Gertrud-Eysoldt-Ring prize for Waiting for Godot at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Koch's film work includes Summer Outside and King Ordinary. Wolfram Koch plays one of the detectives in the Frankfurt-based episodes of the long-running TV crime series Tatort; the other is played by Margarita Broich.
