There is something unmistakably French about the light-hearted frothiness of The Truth, a revival of Florian Zeller’s 2011 comedy about infidelity, now playing in London’s West End. As with many of Zeller’s other works, including the acclaimed The Father and The Mother, this piece delights in destabilising our sense of what is real and who is telling the truth. Here, however, those questions are explored through a brisk comic farce in which two Parisian couples struggle to conceal their web of extramarital affairs.
At the centre of the story is Michel, ably played by Stephen Mangan, who is conducting an affair with Alice (Sarah Hadland) while attempting to keep it hidden from both his wife Laurence (Janie Dee) and Alice’s husband Paul (Ardal O’Hanlon), who also happens to be Michel’s best friend. The one-act play unfolds through a series of short, blackout scenes, pairing Michel in turn with each of the other characters.
Mangan gives a deft comic performance. As Michel’s carefully managed deceptions begin to unravel, Mangan conveys both the character’s mounting panic and his extraordinary capacity for self-justification. The more Michel discovers about the secrets of those around him, the more aggrieved he becomes, seemingly oblivious to his own dishonesty. Around him, the rest of the cast work skilfully to sustain the play’s escalating misunderstandings and reversals. Director Lindsay Posner keeps the action moving at a brisk pace, ensuring that each revelation lands before the next complication arrives. Lizzie Clachan’s ingenious sliding-wall set facilitates seamless transitions between hotel rooms, apartments, offices and a tennis club changing room, giving the production a well-crafted fluidity that suits the material.
Much of the evening’s enjoyment comes from watching the revelation accumulate as alliances shift and assumptions collapse. With Mangan showing great comic timing, Michel is actually more distressed by the fact that Paul has been intentionally losing their tennis matches, more than discovering other truths about his best friend.The audience is continually invited to reassess who knows what, who is lying, and who is being deceived. Zeller clearly owes a debt to earlier comic traditions: there are echoes of Molière’s fascination with social hypocrisy, the sexual intrigues of Restoration comedy, and, as Zeller himself has acknowledged, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.
Yet while the mechanics of the plot are impressively constructed, the play can feel somewhat constrained by its narrow focus on romantic deception. The revelations are cleverly staged and expertly timed, but they do not necessarily go much further. The comedy arises not from the affairs themselves but from the increasingly elaborate attempts to conceal them, and from the hypocrisies exposed in the process. As competent as the performances are, the four protagonists can sometimes seem more like vehicles for the next twist than fully realised individuals. The result is an evening that is consistently entertaining and often very funny, but one that ultimately offers less emotional or psychological depth than some of Zeller’s more ambitious work. Its French-ness stems from the fact that adultery is treated less as a moral failing that needs principled reckoning – but its matter-of -fact acceptance as a feature of bourgeois life.
Still, The Truth delivers exactly what it promises: a polished, intelligent farce driven by strong performances and expertly engineered misunderstandings. It may not linger long in the memory, but it provides a thoroughly enjoyable exercise in comic deception.
(Note: I attended a preview performance prior to the show’s official opening)
The Truth
By: Florian Zeller
Translated by: Christopher Hampton
Directed by: Lindsay Posner
Cast: Stephen Mangan, Ardal O’Hanlon, Sarah Hadland, Janie Dee
Set and Costume Design: Lizzie Clachan
90 minutes, without interval
Running until: 12 September
Photo Credit: Johan Persson