The Truth is a slick, slight comedy of errants

Michel is having an affair with Alice, the wife of his best friend Paul. His own wife, Laurence, may or may not already know. That is the deceptively simple premise of Florian Zeller’s play about deception, named – seductively – The Truth, as if that were something we might get our hands on. Zeller, writer of The Father, the Olivier-nominated play that became a film starring Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins, shares a status with Molière as one of the few French playwrights regularly staged in the West End. He also shares an obsession – artifice – and a style: quick, witty farce, so quick, indeed, it can hoist a hypocrite faster than his own petard.

Michel (Stephen Mangan) is a cheat who comes to feel himself cheated. Who knows what to believe when the truth is a fickle mistress? We speak about a web of lies, but here the network feels more mechanical: a piece of clockwork, ticking, in Lindsay Posner’s zippy, polished production, towards an inevitable “time’s up”. Zeller’s comedy of errants is openly indebted to Pinter’s Betrayal – both tales of middle-class adultery and double-crossed lovers.

Where that play rewound the clock on a misguided but meaningful transgression, this one speeds – over 90 minutes – to the end of a frivolous affair. No sooner than the bedsheets are thrown back are the layers of casual deceit – along with regret – exposed. Alice (Sarah Hadland) wants more affection, or else she will clear her conscience; Michel muses on the meaning of honesty, and decides he doesn’t trust it. Playing on Pinter, the relationship is over before it begins, and the rest is revelation: who knows what, how and when. What remains obscured, however, is a sense of jeopardy: shallow Michel stands to lose his wife and his best friend, but the loss he takes the hardest is a game of tennis.

As Michel, Mangan is a laughable rogue: broad, almost clownish, he punctuates his punchlines with an accusatory finger or arms thrown in faux-outrage in the air. He treads the delicate line between acting like a bad liar and lying like a bad actor, but lacks the nonchalance – that sprinkle of sexy indifference – of a man supposedly capable of shrugging off a risky affair. As they canoodle in their beige hotel room, any chemistry with Hadland’s amiable Alice matches the curtains (Lizzie Clachan’s slick, sliding interiors as economical as Michel’s version of the truth), but is more keenly felt with Janie Dee’s discreet, wry Laurence, a portrait of self-possession with narrowed eyes, and Ardal O’Hanlon’s implausibly sanguine Paul. Michel fancies himself bluffer-in-chief, but with a few knowing smiles, they make a mockery of him and of us all.

The Truth is at Apollo, London W1; until 12 September

Photograph by Johan Persson