The Truth review – Florian Zeller’s knotty comedy of deceit is a real delight

Apollo theatre, London
Stephen Mangan, Sarah Hadland, Ardal O’Hanlon and Janie Dee are seat-shakingly funny in this study of adultery

Alice and Michel must conceal their affair from possibly suspicious spouses Paul and Laurence, sometimes under detective level interrogation. Florian Zeller’s The Truth is a modern French farce that adds to the form’s physical comedy a metaphysical dimension about whether accuracy and veracity are possible or even sensible. 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.

The Truth has an epigraph from Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, the guvnor of adultery dramas, and is consciously a Parisian gloss on the 1978 play’s London uncouplings. Michel and Paul, like Pinter’s Jerry and Robert, are more faithful to their friendship than their marriages and there are similar conversational slips over who knows what and from whom, although for Betrayal’s competitive metaphor of squash Zeller substitutes tennis – match scores becoming another dispute about reliable records.
Continue reading...