There’s a certain kind of Englishman who is more irritated than amused by a certain kind of French film. They usually star Juliette Binoche and three other 50-somethings, all well-dressed, living in beautifully appointed apartments, holding down high-powered jobs (but never seeming to work) and feeling guilty about all the extra-curricular shagging. I’m not sure how many such Englishmen exist, but I can tell you that it’s at least one.
Michel and Alice are spending afternoons doing the aforementioned shagging in hotel rooms, but she wants more commitment and he wants to get to another meeting. So far, so Juliette. But Alice is the wife of Paul, Michel’s best friend and very much the beta to his alpha so… it’s complicated. Laurence, a rather unlikely schoolteacher even for Paris, is Michel’s wife who wears a permanent Mona Lisa smile that bellows “I know more than I’m letting on”.
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Florian Zeller’s comedy (translated by Christopher Hampton no less), is back in London after its 2016 run at the Menier Chocolate Factory and it’s still clever and slick, Lindsay Posner wisely keeping the pace too high for us to consider the plotholes like the utter lack of plausible alibis for overnight trips in the age of the mobile phone. Critical to that sense of spiralling downwards, as the deceits unravel to be replaced by ever more complex duplicities, is Lizzie Clachan’s spare set, just enough to establish each scene uniquely, before it’s replaced by another soulless environment for these soulless individuals.
And that’s a big problem. Each actor has charisma and wit to burn, but we struggle to warm to any of them. Stephen Mangan gives Michel a confidence bordering on arrogance, with his shameless narcissism and hypocrisy the wellspring of many of the laughs (of which there are plenty, but none qualifying as big). I’ve seen too many men like this in politics over the last decade to spend time with them in a theatre, even if Michel is eventually eviscerated by his boneheadedness.
Sarah Hadland’s Alice seems a bit dim, combining a little light self-sabotage with a long game that made you wonder why the hell she started the fling - or, more accurately, continued it - at all. God knows people can go crazy in love, but she wasn’t crazy and she wasn’t in love.
Lower key, and more interesting as a consequence, Paul and Lawrence hint at a more poignant sense of lives petering out and a more nuanced play. Ardal O’Hanlon is splendid as the cuckolded best friend, although it’s near impossible to construct any kind of backstory that holds that amity together over two decades, even at tennis (should be padel now) club. Janie Dee has an ice queen demeanour which leads to some much needed sympathy flowing back across the fourth wall in the denouement, albeit too late to wash away the bad taste left by Michel and Alice.
Not quite a French farce, not quite a comedy of manners, the play proves too reliant on us not turning away with a “Well, they deserve each other” disdainful remark out of the side of the mouth. Yes, you can admire the smarts of the plotting, the technically perfect stagecraft and the comic timing, but, Gee, it’s hard to love.
The Truth at The Apollo Theatre until 12 September
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