The French playwright Florian Zeller is best known for 2012’s “The Father”, the elliptical dementia drama that – in its film adaptation – won Anthony Hopkins his second Oscar, said Clive Davis in The Times.
But he has written more than a dozen plays in all, one of which, “The Forest”, had its world premiere in London in 2022. That play was a misfire – a “pretentious study of bourgeois adultery”.
“The Truth” covers similar territory but is a very different beast. A comedy that “breezes along”, it is like an “old-fashioned English sex farce” with a Gallic twist – and Lindsay Posner’s production is well worth seeing.
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“The Truth” takes the physical comedy of French farce, and adds a “metaphysical dimension about whether accuracy and veracity are possible or even sensible”, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. “Across seven scenes, each featuring two characters, alibis overlap and contradict. Lies may be a tactic to expose truth and vice versa until the plot twists into a double helix of deceit.”
Zeller nods to his debt to Pinter’s “Betrayal”, the “guvnor of adultery dramas”, and as in that play, the two men here “are more faithful to their friendship” than to their wives. “The Truth” is one of seven Zellers translated into English by Christopher Hampton (of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” fame), and it is “made seat-shakingly funny by four fabulously fibbing performers”.
The play opens with a classic farce set-up, said Caroline McGinn on Time Out: a bed from which the rumpled head of Stephen Mangan’s Michel “emerges, looking roguishly pleased” with himself, next to the less satisfied head of Alice, who we discover is the wife of Paul, his best friend. What follows is 90 minutes of tightly plotted light entertainment, and Mangan fans will not be disappointed: he is terrific as the charmer who thinks he is managing to deceive everyone around him.
The other actors – Janie Dee, Sarah Hadland and Ardal O’Hanlon – also expertly navigate the “gathering reliance on contrivance”, and some tricky tonal shifts, said Matt Wolf on London Theatre. This is not a profound piece, but it is fun, in a staging that has been “polished to a glistening sheen”.
Apollo Theatre, London W1. Until 12 September
