Thanks to God of Carnage, I lost a friend: she liked it. I’m hoping we will patch things up. But meanwhile: this piece of shallow arrogance – funny?

Its author, the French writer Yasmina Reza, is lauded for stripping away bourgeois pretence, but when the excavation involves her own body of work, the findings are increasingly thin. Her initial international success, Art, displayed a sparky freshness that helped conceal the obviousness of its observations about male friendship. Life x 3 gave us two educated couples locked in combat, reliving a disastrous dinner party.

Both food and the double-couple concept reappear in Reza’s tiresome God of Carnage, about four parents coming together to discuss a schoolyard altercation between their 11-year-old sons. A roaring success in Paris and London, where it won the Olivier award for Best New Comedy, and now the object of eye-popping reviews on Broadway, the production brings together Alan and Annette, Michael and Veronica.

In London the characters were allowed to retain their original French names. Apparently, New Yorkers are too dim for these references. Displaying the very Gallic condescension she purports to satirise, Reza states in a programme note that “we” – referring to herself and Christopher Hampton, her British collaborator, – “retranslated the play from French to American”.

Hampton’s rendering is at times artificial. Veronica, an art-loving writer assembling a book about Darfur, and given expert timing by Marcia Gay Harden, blurts lines such as: “I detest this pathetic complicity!” Moi aussi. I detest the pathetic complicity between this author and her audiences: Reza shows educated, middle-class people showing their animal natures – the primitive beneath the proper – and audiences howl. God knows that people need a jolt of humour right now, yet when I left the theatre, I thought: I’ll never laugh again.

For all its derivativeness (from Virginia Woolf to The Goat, Edward Albee has been exposing the beastliness beneath the civilised class for decades), God of Carnage is at least attracting non-theatre audiences. Some of them show up to see Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis, who bring commendable conviction to Alan, a lawyer, and Annette, a finance professional. Even more arrive to check out James “Tony Soprano” Gandolfini. I only wish Reza’s play hadn’t, eventually, turned him into a palooka. But that’s the least of its problems.

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