The Truth at Apollo Theatre

“No! Surely you must be joking?! How could you say such a thing?! I can’t see how that applies to me in the slightest!”

Such proclamations are the first language of Michel (be it in the original French of Florian Zeller’s play or here, in Christopher Hampton’s clean translation). An executive of some kind, Michel (Stephen Mangan), has been capitalising on the convenient excuse of out-of-town work trips to continue pursuing a hotel-bound affair with his supposed best friend’s wife. Naturally, he sees enough wrong in it to strongly caution his mistress (Sarah Hadland) against making a guilty confession to hubby back home, but certainly not enough to put a stop to it. “We’re both married. Especially you,” he declares with breezy pragmatism, surmising that it would be especially cruel for her to break the news. After all, her husband is presently out of a job and is in far too vulnerable a position for such news. Indeed, it seems there’s no version of the truth Michel can’t merrily talk himself into, be it with his mistress Alice, wife Laurence (Janie Dee) or friend Paul (Ardal O’Hanlon).

The truth is whatever is most convenient to Michel at that very moment, though the affair he’s tied his life into knots over (knots that will only tighten over the fleet 90 minutes to come) is something he pursues with only middling enthusiasm. That is, until Alice declares it might be best for them to put a stop to the whole thing, at which point he turns clingy and pleading. Michel doesn’t much know what he wants, and seems to care only for maintaining his good image through it all. Mangan can play that kind of “Who, me?!” flop-sweat desperation in his sleep, and he commits himself with athletic intensity to every denial, protestation and cry of deep self-pity of which Michel is capable. Still, there’s a slight tedium that sets in when the protagonist is so un-mouldable a prig. For a time, each scene of Zeller’s play is built on the same dynamic: the hammer blow of recrimination meeting the stubbornly unyielding nail of Michel’s denial. You certainly desire his comeuppance, but that can feel like the sole thing in The Truth you can emotionally latch onto.

Luckily, Zeller – here on very different terrain than his Olivier and Oscar-winning The Father – and director Lindsay Posner have slightly bolder gamesmanship in mind, and The Truth gains considerably in comic energy when it finally reveals that Michel hasn’t really been in control of this story from the beginning. Instead, we are left to delight in the extent to which the noose has already snaked its way around his neck, as the straightforward marital farce set-up is playfully deconstructed, re-shaped and torn down again. Much of that can be attributed to the arrival of O’Hanlon, whose lethally dry deadpan is the perfect counterweight to Mangan’s bluster, and which turns the seemingly hopeless cuckold Paul into the stillest, least predictable person onstage at any time. Dee also renders Laurence an elegant contrast to the increasingly undone Michel, and come the play’s end, she’s lent a semblance of emotional weight to Zeller’s bleak conclusions on the necessity of half-truths and outright lies to keeping any relationship stable and well. Having settled you in for one, rather ordinary play, The Truth‘s pivot into a trickster determined to wrongfoot you is welcome.

Ultimately, Lindsay Posner’s new production of Florian Zeller’s playful marital farce is a little slow to reveal its cards, but there is ample comic gratification to be found when it finally does. A quartet of strong performances mine the material for all it has, and there may even be something to ponder come the conclusion. The Truth may, however, be innately hobbled by its own design. It’s a crafty exercise in deconstruction more than a play that is truly felt, its characters more purposeful blanks than people you can fully believe in. With more emotional texture, there may have been a more lasting impression left in its wake.