1.

LAUGHING WITH THE PESSIMISTS
By Tobias Grey

Financial Times (UK)
February 23, 2008

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d441e4a6-e1b2-11dc-a302-0000779fd2ac.html

When it comes to staging her plays, Yasmina Reza, one of the world's most successful playwrights, leaves nothing to chance. She vets the actors, dissects the directors, and prods the producers. It's a way of working that she first devised more than 20 years ago when she wrote her first play, Conversations After a Burial, and continues with her latest, God of Carnage.

"I was an actress, you see, I knew bad actors would have spoiled what I'd written," says Reza, a delicate- boned 48-year-old, with large expressive brown eyes. "I write for virtuosos, otherwise what's the point?"

In Paris, Reza has directed God of Carnage herself.  "I'm astonished that I never had the guts to do it before," she says, sipping a cup of herbal tea.  "I'd already worked with a lot of directors who let me talk to the actors, sort of hand out advice.  Quite a lot of them suggested I should take it up myself."

The hotel tea-room where we meet begins to fill up with the sound of chatter and spoon-stirring; Reza looks around anxiously. "It's very fragile my writing, fragile in a good way," she continues, stressing each word. "Like something that's been finely chiselled. With great actors it can work, with lesser ones it can't. So I knew it was better to wait for the right actors, the right production and a talented director."

For the Paris premiere of God of Carnage, a four-hander about a married couple who invite another couple round to their house for a chat after their sons have had a violent altercation, it is a wait that has brought her Isabelle Huppert, who plays Véronique, a neurotic do-gooder. The play was partly inspired by a conversation Reza had with her teenage son. "One of his friends had had his tooth broken by another boy," she says, "The mother of my son's friend complained that the boy's parents hadn't even rung up to apologize. I don't know why but something just clicked."

The play has its West End debut next month at the Gielgud Theatre in a production that also has a starry cast: Ralph Fiennes, Janet McTeer, Tamsin Greig, and Ken Stott. Like four of Reza's previous plays -- including her international breakthrough hit Art (1994), it will be directed by Matthew Warchus.

"What appeals to me about Yasmina's plays is that she picks a tiny subject or situation, and from it reveals universal truths," says Warchus. "She somehow manages to write epic drama from a miniature position . . . The kind of drama she's interested in is a world in which somebody vomits, or somebody draws a skier on a white painting, or enters a room and overhears something that they shouldn't have. In a way her plays remind me of Chekhov's."

Like Chekhov, Reza does not seek moral finality in her plays: every character gets a fair shake, however seemingly reprehensible. It is, undoubtedly, one of the reasons actors are so keen to be in her plays. "I could never [judge my characters]," she says. "Perhaps it's my weakness: I love them all. I say weakness because I'm not sure it's a strength for a writer."

Warchus is convinced that Reza's characters represent different facets of her own personality. "She's very honest about her personality," says Warchus. "She says in her plays: I can be good, I can be bad, I can be compassionate, I can be really horrible. It's so honest her work that I find it healing in a way, even though it has none of those pretensions."

Reza is quick to dismiss any notion that she's an intellectual. "I'm not entirely sure if it's typical of French artists or not, this fervent desire to be intellectual," she says. "But for me as a writer what I do is anti-intellectual. That is, I see the world and talk about it with a maximum of subjectivity, with all the strong contradictions, even bad faith, that involves."

Reza believes her refusal to adopt intellectual positions has alienated her from many French critics, who have never praised her in quite the same way as their American, British, and German counterparts.

"My relationship with the French critics is complicated," she says. "Being successful doesn't win you many friends over here. When you have a popular success, there's automatically the suspicion that because what you've done is commercial it's not very good. Another thing the French didn't like very much was that as soon as I could, I took my plays around the world. They thought that it was me being disdainful of France, which is untrue. Though, it is true I was always more interested in what was going on in New York or London than in Paris."

The incredible success of Art, a play ostensibly about three male friends arguing the merits of an all-white painting, was the crucial turning point in Reza's career. Indeed, since its first staging in Paris in 1994, Art, which has been translated into 35 languages, has taken more than $300m on its travels, the magazine Business Week once calculated.

It was Sean Connery's French wife Micheline who first raised the possibility of bringing Art to an audience outside France. She had seen the play in Paris and thought there might be a film role in it for her husband. Sean Connery offered to buy the movie rights from Reza, who turned him down. He then asked her what she wanted to do with the play.

"I said to myself that if it got turned into a film, then it would be dead as a play," remembers Reza. "When Sean asked me what I dreamed of doing with it, I said I wanted it to go on the London stage. That's how he ended up producing it."

Art ushered in some fruitful partnerships for Reza. Not only with Warchus, who was only 30 years old at the time, but also with the English playwright Christopher Hampton, who has translated five of Reza's plays from French into English.

"I think she absolutely has a voice and has carved out a particular area which is recognizably her own," says Hampton. "Her first play, Conversations after a Burial, I think, is consciously Chekhovian, but since then she's developed into something more particular. She's what you might call a lepidopterist of the middle class."

Art's extraordinary international success has made Reza the first French playwright since Jean Anouilh to seduce Anglophone audiences. The play won a Tony award in the U.S., a Laurence Olivier award in Britain and four Molières in France. Since then she has found little trouble mounting subsequent plays overseas. But, paradoxically, Art gave Reza an enormous creative headache.

She worried that she would never be able to move out from under its shadow. "There's something very sad about reaching your horizons," says Warchus. "It makes you feel tired, empty, lonely, alienated even. That happened to Yasmina quite early on in her work as a writer. There's this pressure of 'how do you ever write something that will ever be that successful again?' Everything you write, whether it's better or worse, will be measured against that first success."

Reza has, however, kept on writing, and not just plays but novels, memoirs and, most recently, a book about Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential campaign. "I write when life is not enough," she told one interviewer, and it is true that her writing, though darkly comic, is imbued with a rare melancholy.

Reza has developed what she describes as "a certain vision of the world" by embracing her Jewish origins: "In my first novel, *Desolation*, I wrote a phrase I think says a lot about me and my writing and my relationship with my friends. It went: 'You can only laugh with the great pessimists.' When I ask a friend, 'How are you doing?' and they reply, 'I'm feeling terrible,' that opens a door to laughter, and we laugh. How Jewish is that!"

The elder of three sisters, one of whom died in infancy, Reza was born in Paris in May 1959. Her mother is still alive -- very much the Jewish matriarch, says Reza -- having fled with her family to Paris after the Communists came to power in her native Hungary. Reza's father, a Jew with Iranian and Spanish ancestry born in Moscow in the middle of the Russian Revolution, died a few years ago. He, too, had fled with his parents to Paris, where he had met and married Reza's mother.

In her slim memoir Nulle Part ['Nowhere'] (2005). Reza, who has two teenage children by her former partner, the film director Didier Martiny, says she has always felt like an outsider. "I don't know the languages of my father, my mother, my ancestors, I recognize neither land nor tree; there is no soil that I can call my own or say this is where I come from . . ."

However, while it is not unknown for artists to embellish their early years with tales of penury and personal suffering, Reza, as confident, contrary, and paradoxical in her dealings with the press as any of her characters, did precisely the opposite by choosing to describe her upbringing in the most idyllic terms. And in France a reputation as a writer born with a silver spoon in her mouth stuck fast, much to her chagrin.

Three years ago, in an interview with the French literary magazine Lire, she attempted to set the record straight and admitted to having lied. "I reinvented my life . . . I hated the intrusion into my life and the questions about my privacy, my parents, the place where I was born, or where I grew up."

Today, Reza still dislikes the prying nature of interviews. "If I was living in an ideal world, there wouldn't be any need for them," she says. "I write book, I write plays, that should be enough. Why did I tell *Lire* I lied? Because I'd made up this glossy story about my life which was blown out [of] proportion by journalists, and I found myself saddled with this story . . . I felt I needed to say, 'No, everything wasn't that easy,' but it hasn't really changed anything."

Does she still feel a similar urge to lie? "No, but I don't need to tell everything about myself either," she replies, as confident and contrary an interviewee as ever.

--Le Dieu du carnage is showing until March 29 at the Théâtre Antoine, 75010 Paris. God of Carnage opens on March 8 at the Gielgud Theatre, London W1. www.godofcarnage.com