The Truth (Wyndham's Theatre, 31 June)

Whenever your culture-vulture friends say withering things about West End shows, they mean middling stuff like this. I can't remember anyone's name, so I'll just call them by random French ones: Guilliame is having an affair with Fifi, who is married to Tabernacle; but Tabernacle--zut alors--has been laid off, and is Guilliame's best friend. And what of Clothilde, Guilliame's wife? You'll never guess. There was even wan accordian music between the acts, lest we forget that this was taking place in France, a country where (in the English imaginary) affairs are entered into with all the zest of Netflix selections. This wasn't even particularly funny, I think in part because no-one on stage acted convincingly human. I missed The Father last year, but judging from this, Florian Zeller is definitely the new Yasmina Reza: someone whose not-fantastic plays, owing to a certain basic shallowness, do well in translation. And in this global middlebrow, we know it's France because there's adultery and French names; otherwise, this could have been set anywhere in the world, to no particular advantage. 

I mean, let's take a moment to look at that being laid off thing: does that mark this as a subtle inquiry into marital mores under neoliberalism? I guess. And the firm that hires Tabernacle late in the play is Swedish, so we have some point about the contemporary EU and transnationalism. And, then, maybe that's the point: that life under neoliberalism is so crushingly boring that--I dunno? We need shitty light farce? Or, maybe, that we're doomed to it?

So rote and uninspired as to be nearly avant-garde--I'm still half afraid that I missed the subtle point that would indicate this airless hetero farce, which could have been written at any point since about 1905, was in fact some terribly up-to-date inquiry into gender roles. But no: no-one is gay or trans, or even interesting; and the translation seemed only about 95% idiomatic. If someone had told me this script had been generated by computers, I would have been fascinated: they really can do such an amazing job synthesizing genres these days. And the performers did the whole farce-by-numbers thing, acting exactly as you would expect them to; full points there, even as I would assume robots might hit their lines with slightly more accuracy. 

If anyone had ideas here, it was the set designers, from whom I got exactly one idea: that high-end hotels and nice middle-class houses all sort of look the same. That's not exactly Epic Theatre, though.

I fear the audience I was with thought this was fascinating--and, as in (say) reading Foucault translations, I worried that there was some subtle irony (or point of interest altogether) I was missing here. Was I having an off day? Does the Matrix have me?