Amusing, but mildly distressing too
Florian Zeller’s The Lie (Le Mensonge) is the most astonishing night of comedy to be found this side of the Channel. It’s even better than that West End succès fou of his
The Father. Can you believe it? You shouldn’t. I was lying. But of course if you fall for that dismissive line, then more fool you, too.
If you find the strategy of making an assertion, then contradicting it, then undermining that contradiction irritating then maybe The Lie isn’t for you. Its aim is to make its audience’s heads spin. It stands you, as it were, on a rug, whips that from under you, plummets you through a trapdoor and then another, before setting you back to almost where you started, like some Escher drawing.
It’s a companion-piece to The Truth
– which also had its English-language premiere at the Menier (and also in a translation by Christopher Hampton). And once again, using the same four characters (or at least characters of the same name who stand in similar relation to each other), it interrogates the idea of companionship. In Zeller’s cynical – but who’s to say inaccurate? – view of the world, deceit, mistrust and infidelity are as invasive as knotweed in the garden of love, yet perhaps play as integral a role as they do a destructive one.
The setting is chic, desirable, Parisian (Anna Fleischle’s design makes you want to hop on the Eurostar) but we’re in the drear land of marital discord. The evening begins with a dispute between Alice and Paul (Samantha Bond playing opposite her real-life husband Alexander Hanson
– a neat soupçon of meta-theatricality also employed at the French premiere). She wants to cancel their imminently arriving dinner guests (Tony Gardner’s Michel and Alexandra Gilbreath’s Laurence) because she saw Michel, Paul’s best friend, kissing an unknown woman in the street and doesn’t want to lie to Laurence about it. Paul advises that she keep shtum for everyone’s sake. And then the doorbell rings…
Knowing that Zeller is an inveterate game-player takes the edge off some of the inevitable twists that follow. And the sense of strain isn’t helped by director Lindsay Posner’s inclination to lend the overall mood more Feydeau-like joviality than disconcerting, Pinter-esque menace (Hanson, the more expressively evasive of the quartet, seldom matches Bond for enigmatic poise). Lines such as “She lied to you. Believe me. None of it was true” – can sound contrived to the point of risible yet the artifice is, finally, at the service of something tangible, and painful.
No, it’s not as compelling as The Father. But how much the evening engages you will depend on how willing you are to filter its action through your own experiences. I can’t easily say whether it was good, bad or indifferent. What I can say is that I was amused by it, thrown by it, and even left mildly distressed by it too. I think that’s its desired effect.