The Last Laugh.(God of Carnage)(The Norman Conquests)(Theater review)

Byline: ADAM GREEN editor: Valerie Steiker

Director Matthew Warchus brings two darkly hilarious London hits to Broadway.

The English theater director Matthew Warchus may just be the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. Last year, he staged a David Mamet revival at the Old Vic, a Yasmina Reza premiere on the West End, Marc Camoletti's Boeing Boeing on Broadway, and, back at the Old Vic, an Alan Ayckbourn trilogy, pausing only to participate in the birth of his son via cell phone while waiting for a flight at JFK. "I do get into a tangle sometimes," Warchus, 42, admits, "which can have a certain comic element."

The same could be said about the two superb productions that Warchus brings to New York this monthReza's barbed drawing-room comedy God of Carnage and Ayckbourn's doleful farce The Norman Conquests. With Ionesco's Exit the King and Beckett's Waiting for Godot also on the boards, there is clearly a market on Broadway for black comedy. As Warchus says, "Rueful contemplation has become part of the currency of late."

The son of an actor turned vicar, the Yorkshire-raised director first made a splash with visually extravagant productions of theatrical rarities. His deft handling of such two- and three-man gems as Sam Shepard's True West and Reza's blockbuster Art has since earned him a reputation as a master of chamber pieces. "I realized that emotional intensity could be as overwhelming as spectacle," he says.

God of Carnage, which looks at the savagery lurking beneath bourgeois civility, is certainly intense. As in London, where the cast included Ralph Fiennes and Janet McTeer, Reza and Warchus have proved to be catnip for top-flight actors. James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden are Michael and Veronica, an upwardly mobile couple who have arranged for a sit-down with Alan (Jeff ...