Melbourne Theatre Company has, despite the constant uncertainty of ongoing lockdowns, had an incredibly strong start to the theatrical year, relying on small casts and whip-smart writing, clever design and rock solid direction. It was probably inevitable that its luck would run out eventually. Florian Zeller, fresh from Oscar triumph with the film adaptation of his play The Father, delivers the company’s first true letdown of 2021, a leaden, repetitive comedy with no heart and a highly irritating central performance. Sadly, The Truth will not set you free.
It’s French, so of course it’s about marital infidelity. Michel (Stephen Curry) is schtupping his best friend’s wife, Alice (Katrina Milosevic), in a nondescript hotel room in Paris. On a Thursday. That last detail is what passes for texture in Zeller’s strangely two-dimensional world, where the length of an affair can be useful for a plot development or a punchline but has no effect whatsoever on the emotional stakes. Michel’s wife, Laurence (Michala Banas), is either completely clueless to this affair or doesn’t care a jot (and if she doesn’t, why the hell should we?). The same goes for the best friend, Paul (Bert LaBonté), who seems so dissociated it looks like pathology.
The plot revolves around the dilemma of truth telling: namely, should Alice confess to Paul and should Michel confess to Laurence? And while they are at it, shouldn’t Michel also confess to Paul, given that he is schtupping Paul’s wife? Zeller does give Alice and Michel one interesting conversation about truth (this time in another nondescript hotel room in Bordeaux) that flirts with ideas around hurtful truths and comforting lies. Alice wonders if we’d be better off telling all the truths all the time, and Michel ruefully notes how horrific that world would be.
The Truth seems constantly on the verge of becoming interesting – perhaps as a treatise on the truths we accept and the ones we myopically refuse to acknowledge, both within our relationships and within ourselves. There’s the question of the nature of truth hovering in the background. But every time the play tilts towards authenticity or threatens to develop an idea, Zeller pulls it back into the trite and superficial. The characters are so thin, their emotional arcs so narrow, that it is hard to care what happens to any of them. Again, it is a play virtually devoid of stakes.
Zeller is ostensibly channelling Molière; this is a world where despicable behaviour is first indulged, then mercilessly sent up and finally punished, where a vaudevillian approach to character underlines and sharpens the satire. Certainly the role of Michel is as detestable, as arrogant, self-deluded and emotionally crippled as the Miser or the Misanthrope. And perhaps an actor of immense charm and skill could have made him work in a modern context. Unfortunately, Curry is not that actor.
The problem begins early and only intensifies: Curry mistakes actorly tics for characterisation, and the further down the gestural path he goes the less convincing he is. Michel is a flat-out narcissist, but we should at least recognise him as an actual person. Molière understood that his villains were grotesques, but that they were our grotesques, that our society birthed them and therefore shares the blame for their excesses. Curry’s Michel is utterly unrecognisable, a painfully arch and mannered bore. He’s also literally on stage for the entire running time.
The other actors do their best with limited means. LaBonté is a performer with charm to burn, so Paul’s aloofness reads almost as a moral position, if not quite an attitude of spiritual detachment. The role certainly doesn’t stretch this actor much, but like always he’s a welcome addition. Banas is given very little to do until the final, crucial scene, in which she excels; her private breakdown is the closest thing the play gets to genuine feeling. Best of all is Milosevic’s Alice, who manages to flit and skim on the surface of her dilemma, coquettish but somehow also grounded. She’s the closest thing to a person on stage.
Director Sarah Giles has to shoulder some of the blame. With a script this glib, encouraging glibness from the actors is deathly, and the constant breaking of the fourth wall (notably by Curry, who seems desperate for us to find him funny) merely weakens the play’s already balsa-like dramatic structure. Marg Horwell’s set leans into this meta-theatrical reading, with false walls and stairs to nowhere; it’s clever but it doesn’t help the play.
Zeller’s play is ten years old now (while it was translated by Christopher Hampton in 2017, it premiered in French in 2011), and the intervening years have not been kind to it. The women aren’t shrinking violets or mere victims, but they are mainly adjuncts to the male ego, pawns in a power play between preening men. And like the men, it isn’t half as funny or charming as it thinks it is, in a production that betrays the grinding mechanism in the dramatic structure. Those audiences who were enthralled by The Father would do well to stay away from The Truth. The last thing Melbourne needs is more crushing disappointment.