Review: The Truth
[Apollo Theatre || June 9th to September 12th 2026 || 1h 30m]
Structured in the form seven separate dialogues, Florian Zeller’s The Truth feels at once like a condensed sitcom and an episode of said sitcom stretched beyond its capacity. Running at a lean 85 minutes, it follows Michel (Stephen Mangan) who for the last six months has been having an affair with Alice (Sarah Hadland). Alice is the wife of Paul (Ardal O’Hanlon), Michel’s best friend of twenty years and, wracked with guilt, she wants to tell all. However, Michel has no intention of coming clean with either Paul or his own wife Laurence (Janie Dee) and seeks to prevent them from discovering the truth. As the secrets and lies escalate and new revelations come to light, chaos and “hilarity” soon ensue.
This is comedy so broad you could steer an aircraft carrier through it. It smacks of BBC Saturday night; it’s not quite at the level of Mrs. Brown’s Boys but it’s hardly an exercise in subtlety, though in fairness nor does it claim to be or market itself as such. Likewise, though it isn’t catchphrase comedy it isn’t entirely removed from it either, with Mangan’s character in particular repeating and recycling gags, and though it flirts with being a bawdy sex comedy, there’s little bawdiness or even sex to speak of as the script ultimately drowns in tiresome, heteronormative clichés about relationships, albeit tiresome, heteronormative clichés that sometimes raise a chuckle or two.
There are parallels here with Mike Bartlett’s Unicorn, which also starred Stephen Mangan and likewise lightly ribbed middle class sensibilities around sex and secrets and which was similarly toothless in its satire. As with that show, there are no risks here. It relies on its obviousness - the joke, in effect, is that we can all see the plot falling into place before the characters can - and though it almost won me over with its sheer insistence, the nudge-nudge-wink-wink quasi-Carry On fluff, which perhaps might have been more effective and even sophisticated in Zeller’s original French, is ultimately grating and leaves four perfectly able comic actors struggling to navigate it.
O’Hanlon and Dee are solid but underused, and it’s a shame that they never get to share the stage. Sarah Hadland is decent too, but her character is monstrously underwritten and so she is unable to get a proper grip on her. Mangan, meanwhile, who features in every scene, is actively bad. His performance is strained and overcooked, and so jokes that have already had the nuance stripped from them become even more annoying as Mangan yells them in lieu of trying to make them land. That’s not to say that there aren’t some laughs to be had. A sequence in which Michel tries to pass himself off as Alice’s aunt on the phone is hilarious and the tête-à-tête between Michel and Laurence towards the end of the play offers an enjoyable pay off but there just isn’t enough substance and the laughs are cheap.
Tickets for The Truth are available here.