The Truth opens with a classic farce set-up: a rumpled bed from which the rumpled head of Stephen Mangan's Michel emerges, looking roguishly pleased with itself, next to the equally rumpled but less satisfied head of Alice (Sarah Hadland) who is, we soon discover, Michel's best friend's wife. Over the course of 90 tightly-plotted minutes, it becomes enjoyably clear that neither Michel, Alice nor their cuckolded spouses Paul and Laurence, would know what the truth was if it came and bit them on the bottom.
There is plenty to laugh at and to like about Lindsay Posner's production, which was a hit in 2016 at the Menier Chocolate Factory and is now revived, with extra star power, for the West End. It's a concise evening of polished, satisfyingly light entertainment, with a strong cast, an early finish time, and fairly reasonable ticket prices. Mangan fans won't be disappointed, his performance is more than worth the entry fee. He is fantastically enjoyable as Michel, bringing irresistible hangdog charm and ageing himbo vibes to the character who believes he is successfully deceiving everyone around him. His epic tantrum on discovering that he is the more deceived is hilarious: utterly hypocritical, and heartfelt. Michel's arc is the driving force of the story and when Mangan commits to his outrage, it lifts the comedy to the next level and really makes it grip.
A comic ensemble often finds a deeper groove during a show's run. On opening night, it stopped just short of being sublimely funny. Maybe I'm being an unsophisticated Brit here, but I would have liked to see the truth biting them on the bottom a bit more, physically speaking. Prolific French writer Florian Zeller's four-hander, directed with careful pacing and some restraint by Posner, is surprisingly talky for an adultery comedy. Nobody lurks behind designer Lizzie Clachlan's poised, un-used sofa, there's no desperate wrestling for the phone; hardly any of the farcical business that can play so richly on stage in this scenario.
This cocktail of evasions, delusions and selfishness slips down with delicious ease
Instead we get layers of self-serving, sophisticated back-and-forth about the nature of truth: ‘you're not lying to him’, Michel tells Alice, ‘just not telling him the truth. It's not the same thing at all’. Each of the seven scenes is a two-hander which unpeels another layer off what you think you know about the antics of the mutually deluding foursome – whom we never see all together onstage – until their truth, if there is such a thing, is revealed as an impossibly complicated tissue of lies.
Zeller's regular translator Christopher Hampton retains the French names and places, in a knowing nod to gallic cultural stereotypes: it becomes delightfully clear that these couples are getting off more from their intellectual justifications and head-games than their extra-marital sex. Everyone is playing a double game here, which requires the actors to turn in performances that make sense before and after the next layer of deceit unpeeled.
Janie Dee brings emotional depth and a lingering, discomfiting strain of sadness as Michel's wife, Laurence. I found the layers of Sarah Hadland's Alice, and Ardal O'Hanlon's Paul harder to unpick: they're both very funny actors, but her apparently sincere wish to come clean and his unreadable, unbothered attitude sat oddly with subsequent revelations. However, a little bit of post-match headscratching didn't dent my enjoyment in the moment.
This cocktail of evasions, delusions and selfishness slips down with delicious ease. Deceit, argues Michel, self-servingly, is essential to love, marriage and civilisation. This is pacy, sophisticated thought-provoking fun - which will probably prompt some intriguing conversations between couples in the bar afterwards.
