I wanted to love this, but I didn't. And that's okay. Trois Versions de la Vie is definitely the logical predecessor to Reza's masterpiece Le Dieu du Carnage. In the former, she didn't quite take it there, didn't quite manage to create a believable bourgeois slaughter of such magnificent proportions.
Trois Versions de la Vie is a 4-person piece reduced to a classical basic situation. The couple Finidori (Hubert and Ines) visit another, but by mistake one day early, which exposes and intensifies the main conflict even faster. In itself, it is about the question of whether the host Henri will sacrifice his dignity by subordinating himself to his guest and professional superior Hubert (both men are astrophysicists). However, the issue that comes to the fore is how Henri deals with what Hubert seems to casually refer to as a message that may make his three-year research paper wasteful, and would thus prevent the take off of Henri's career. The host couple also have a child who keeps wailing and calling out to their parents from the nursery, which causes the couples to quarrel over educational principles. All the possible confrontations and changing coalitions that develop from these tensions are explored in Trois Versions de la Vie. In her fifth play, Reza offers three different versions of how the evening may go, all ending in ruin.
Reza's fifth play joins the ranks of her other theater plays in terms of premise, character archetypes and a plot that soon finds its climax in verbal abuse and the removal of masks behind which our protagonists hide the ugly side of their nature. However, where Le Dieu du Carnage proved its brilliancy by delivering not only a satirical but also a very realistic look into human nature, Trois Versions de la Vie falls rather flat. Much of its dialogue seems contrived. Many of the twists and turns seem to come out of the blue. Many of the fights seem to blow up without any trigger, and that makes them come off as forced and unforeseeable.
Nonetheless, the play can definitely score in one regard: its exploration of different possible outcomes by playing through three different versions of the evening, one more hilarious than the other. This enables Reza to show that these characters (with their differing personalities and prejudiced attitudes towards one another) were doomed from the start. No matter how they act, they will always attract the wrath of the others.
In the first version, Henri accuses his wife of being selfish because she does not want to dress up; however, he throws the same accusation at her in the second version, precisely because she wants to change her clothes quickly before the guests arrive. In the first version, Henri was so intimidated by his boss that he wanted to avoid the shame of his wife being dressed inappropriately. In the second version, we see him for the jealous husband he really is, a man who sees Hubert as a competitor for the heart of his wife… and as it later turns out: not without good reason. No matter how Sonia acts, Henri will never be pleased with her decision.
Despite the fact that Trois Versions de la Vie is a weaker play compared to Reza's magnum opus, it does seem to be a necessary one. The ideas behind Sonia and Henri and Ines and Hubert seem to have grown into the brilliant characters that are Véronique and Michel and Annette and Allain from Le Dieu du Carnage. And even though the tame exchange of blows of the former seem to pale before the proper bourgeois slaughter of the latter, it also becomes clear that only they made it possible. I don't think Reza would have written Carnage without having written Trois Versions, and thus I am grateful it exists.