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Best known here for his emotionally gruelling stage trilogy The Father, The Mother and The Son, French writer Florian Zeller took a diversion into that Gallic staple, the existential sex comedy, in this 2011 work. Stephen Mangan’s Michel, embroiled in an affair with his best friend Paul’s wife Alice, becomes trapped in a web of deceit between them and his own wife Laurence so absurd yet profound the very idea of truth collapses.
Despite its loftier ambitions the play functions as a manically effervescent, farcical comedy of manners in Lindsay Posner’s starry, polished revival, expertly translated by Zeller’s trusted collaborator Christopher Hampton. This is a glossy, old-fashioned West End night out, and none the worse for that.
It starts with a bang, as Michel and Alice (Sarah Hadland) climax in a hotel room bed. She’s immediately, post-coitally troubled by the infidelity, while he’s preoccupied with finding his socks. When Alice accuses him of being emotionless, he cites a recent diagnosis of tachycardia as proof that he has a heart. He sublimates any guilt he feels at betraying his closest chum in disgust at the bosses who recently gave Paul the sack from a finance director job. “People don’t go in for ethics any more,” he fumes.
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The breeziness of the dialogue, the blandly stylish clothes, the way the tasteful hotel room morphs into the two couples’ chicly modern apartments – all are essential to a mood of self-satisfied Parisian insouciance that is upended by deception, but might be shattered entirely by the truth. When Laurence (Janie Dee) first implies that she knows Michel is up to something, he immediately goes on both the offensive and the defensive, accusing her of being distrustful and suspicious, and compounding one lie with another.
Michel steadily loses track of who knows what and who’s lying to whom. He is outraged by the idea that Paul didn’t tell him he knew he was sleeping with Alice. Lines and verbal tics start to recur and trip him up, and references to his and Paul’s regular tennis matches become an obvious metaphor for sex (“I’m better than him”).
Mangan is perfect for this part, alternately cocksure and queasily desperate: no one plays “sheepishly caught out” quite like him. Dee is poised and soigne in the least developed role of Laurence, her beady gaze seeming to see into Michel’s secret heart. Paul doesn’t even appear for the first half of this brisk 90-minute affair, and Ardal O’Hanlon’s performance initially seems underpowered, until he drops a brilliantly timed narrative bombshell with understated comic aplomb. Hadland is adroit as Alice, forever wavering between guilt and lust, self-possession and abandon.
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The fact that the characters are inconsistent is part of the point. These are professional people – businessmen, a teacher, an optician – with apparently stable family lives but chaos lurks just beneath the surface. Michel confidently compartmentalises himself as a husband, lover and friend, but when his certainty crumbles his identity threatens to go with it.
Still only 47, the polymathic Zeller is a film and theatre director and novelist as well as a playwright, so it’s perhaps no surprise that his oeuvre should embrace this apparently light comedy as well as the sturm und drang of The Father and The Mother. Tonally, The Truth recalls the works of Yasmina Reza, the Parisian writer of Art and God of Carnage.
Christopher Hampton was instrumental in bringing her works to London audiences from the mid-90s, as he would do with Zeller’s in the 2010s. A towering playwright in his own right, the influence of his translating skills is impossible to calculate. Posner, meanwhile, is arguably our most ego-free director (at least from the audience’s perspective: I’ve no idea what he’s like in the rehearsal room). Here, as ever, he serves the text without flash or fancy, and the result is a sleek night’s entertainment, full of explosive laughs.
To 12 Sept, thetruthplay.com
