Infidelity with a double shot of espresso

The Truth

Menier Chocolate Factory

In the event of Brexit, here’s hoping the French government isn’t tempted to impose a retaliatory Zeller levy, hiking up the cost of seeing a Florian Zeller play in translation, to punitive levels. If they did, we would be in trouble.

With The Father – back once more in the West End – the multi-talented Parisian, 36, has delivered the most talked-about play of the past year. Its companion The Mother was seen to acclaim in Bath and London. And now, with Christopher Hampton again translating, La Chocolaterie Menier (everything sounds better in French) is mounting The Truth. What a strikerate and we’re still less than half-way through his dramatic oeuvre.

In truth, his 2011 comedy about marital infidelity, and the lying game that is its habitual bed-fellow, is the slightest of the three we’ve seen, but even weak-strength Zeller is still a shot of double espresso in comparison with much other new writing.

It’s plainly indebted to Pinter, particularly Betrayal, but it’s equally influenced by Molière and the traditions of French farce too, in which one bêtise leads to another and in attempting to avoid discovery, the protagonist, customarily male, makes life increasingly frantic for himself.

Michel is an archetypal cheating hog, who has been having an affair for four months – or is it six, he can’t quite remember – with his unemployed best friend Paul’s wife Alice (Frances O’Connor, mainly magnifique). When confronted by his wife (Tanya Franks’ sorrowful Laurence) with calm requests to explain himself (he said he was at a meeting, and plainly wasn’t), he blusters and attempts to turn the tables, taking her doubt as an outrage.

He is a hypocrite, false to his core, yet so brazen, he is almost charming, the boy who wouldn’t grow up. In Alexander Hanson’s hilariously shifty performance – by turns insouciant and subtly panicked, fitfully squirming – we’re given a master class in barefaced audacity. Does he deserve sympathy? His fraudulence is a kind of blindness. Who has been doing the dirty on whom, and for how long?

The twists are a touch predictable – some of the scenes groan with contrivance – but the production (briskly directed by Lindsay Posner, with chic impersonal interiors by Lizzie Clachan) has an overall confidence and poise that feels plausible and there are strong undercurrents of emotional veracity.

A comedy that makes you laugh, makes you think: pas mal. Until May 7. Tickets: 020 7378 1713; menierchocolatefactory.com