Florian Zeller is a French dramatist with a palpable love of symmetry. He followed The Father, about dementia, with The Mother, about maternal obsession. Now, as a companion piece to The Truth, seen last year at the Menier, comes The Lie. But while the new play, in Christopher Hampton’s translation, has the zip and wit of its predecessor, it feels like an elegant variation on a familiar theme.
As before, the subject is how much sincerity intimate relationships can stand: the four characters even have the same names as those in The Truth. This time, however, the focus is on Paul and Alice, who are about to entertain their married friends, Michel and Laurence, for dinner. Since Alice has earlier glimpsed Michel kissing a woman passionately in the street, she is confronted by a dilemma: how much should she reveal to Michel’s wife? She seems to have a compulsion towards the truth whereas her husband, the eternal pragmatist, argues for the necessary lie. But although we never see the fraught dinner party, the play shows us how Paul and Alice’s own marriage is an endless labyrinth of deceit.
Zeller applies Cartesian logic to the standard adultery comedy. He also pins down astutely the way moral attitudes are often dictated by self-interest: when Paul claims that “lying is a sign of love”, you are never sure whether he is arguing from principle or simply protecting his own base. But, while the play is shrewdly observant, it also feels claustrophobic. There is the briefest of references to Michel’s career as a publisher but Zeller largely confines the conflict between lies and truth to middle-class marriage. I began to pine for the polyphonic richness of Molière’s The Misanthrope which opens up the debate to embrace society at large.
Lindsay Posner’s production, however, is fleet and chic and offers the frisson of seeing a real-life married couple play Paul and Alice. Alexander Hanson, taking over at short notice as Paul, gives a superbly accomplished study of a man who defends marital deception as if it were a moral virtue and who is tortured when his own philosophy rebounds on him. Samantha Bond as Alice matches him perfectly, alternating between virtuous indignation and rattled panic. Tony Gardner and Alexandra Gilbreath complete this sexual quadrille with style and I would only urge Zeller to excise a redundant, needlessly explanatory epilogue.
•At Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 18 November. Box office: 020-7378 1713.
