“I just want to figure out what kind of play we’re in…to figure out whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy.”
So our main protagonist Michel laments after one of many in a series of the play’s big twists and turns.
“It’s not so easy to tell these days,” replies Paul, his best friend of 20 years. In many ways, that’s the best plot summary of the play I can give without revealing too many of the reveals and spoiling the fun of The Truth — or the obfuscation of it.
The show centres on two married couples and opens to a man and woman in bed. ‘The Rendezvous’, a caption at the top of the stage calls it.
Michel (played by a superbly funny Stephen Mangan) jumps up to haphazardly get dressed after a hotel tryst with Alice (Sarah Hadland), who is not his wife and, as it turns out, is married to the aforementioned best friend Paul (Ardal O’Hanlan). The two have been having an affair for the past six months and are debating whether or not to tell their spouses.
Alice is feeling guilty and wants to tell the truth. Michel, meanwhile, staunchly believes they should not, arguing that it would be selfish to tell the truth and ruminating on the meaning of honesty. It would be especially bad, he argues, given Paul had recently lost his job and is going through a tough time of things.
“I still can’t get over the way the bastards threw him out. Those people have no decency, really. People don’t go in for ethics any more,” Michel says just moments after getting out of bed with his friend’s wife with not a trace of irony. In fact, later on in the play Michel comes to see himself as the one who has been betrayed when it is revealed that both Paul and his wife Laurence (Janie Dee) might know more than they immediately let on .
These lines of outrage become the refrain of the play for the next 90 minutes, whether Michel is saying it to his wife at home or sitting in the locker room with Paul after a tennis match. At times this repetition feels a little excessive, but the play is self-aware about it — when Michel launches into the same outraged lines yet again, Laurence herself flags the repetition, cutting him off wearily — showing it to be an intentionally frustrating demonstration of Michel’s lack of awareness from Florian Zeller.
So while an affair — or affairs — are not typically the subject of comedy, here, the ever elusive truth and the question of who knows what, becomes a delightfully farcical tale of deceit. Each scene unfurls in quick succession, a series of seven dialogues, with Michel featuring in all of them with dizzying energy, and a new plot twist — or several — happening each time.
Lindsay Posner, who also directed the play at Menier Chocolate Factory a decade ago, guides us smoothly from scene to scene and there is never a lull as the characters are hit by revelation after revelation without missing a beat.
Also returning to the production is Lizzie Clachan, who brings a sleek and simple French feel to the set design, with each set deliberately feeling almost eerily similar to the last — a clever formal echo of the interchangeability of the affairs and couples themselves. There’s even a joke about the hotel feeling familiar when Alice and Michel’s affair continues at another hotel where the only difference is a swapped out painting on the wall.
This production is laugh out loud funny and I’ve never heard an audience gasp as much as long-standing writing duo Zeller (of The Father, The Mother and The Son) and translator Christopher Hampton (of Les Liaisons Dangereuses) keep constantly switching direction.
O’Hanlan brings exceptional comic timing to the seemingly cheated Paul, playing the quiet, understated counterpart to Mangan’s frenetic energy. Dee, meanwhile, is expertly measured and wry — the most enigmatic of all the characters.
While the play at times feels like it is building to an altercation between the four characters, it stops short of a big conclusion and instead leaves us with unresolved, elusive gestures at truth. Instead of a neatly tied up ending, it ends with a long scene between Michel and Laurence where Dee shines in her poised and understated intentionality, communicating through subtle gestures and looks that the audience sees, and Michel never notices.
As the audience our understanding of the situation mirrors Michel’s, and when we think he holds all the answers, so do we, but in that final scene we’re let in on more, and we see that the truth is even less clear than we think, and Laurence is a far more layered individual than Michel could have possibly imagined.
The Truth plays at Apollo Theatre in London until 12 September. For more information and bookings, please visit the website.
