If you’ve been feeling weighed down by all the heavy dramas and theatre shows as of late, the next one in your calendar of events should be welcome respite. The Singapore Repertory Theatre is dissecting the uncomfortable topic of partners cheating on each other to excavate fresh gags, in a translated staging of French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth.
The premise reads like the pilot of that thinly strung together Netflix comedy Friends from College: Michael and Paul are best friends; and Michael is having an affair with Paul’s wife Alice. Michael’s wife and Paul both suspect their partners have been unfaithful—but whom with? As Alice starts to get eaten away by the guilt, the two middle-aged couples have to pull themselves out of an increasingly sticky web of lies. Translated by Christopher Hampton, the production promises an equal mix of French humour and local wit (the suggestion that the latter exists should be reason enough to go).
Not all farce, the play will set out to balance the laughs with important themes like fragile masculinity, unhappiness in one’s life, infidelity and deceit. Landing at KC Arts Centre on Apr 3, The Truth is UK-based Singapore theatre director Ng Choon Ping’s directing debut on home soil; in 2014, Ng received the inaugural Royal Exchange Hodgkiss Award for Young Director in London. Look out for an ensemble cast of fresh and familiar faces, including Lim Yu-Beng, Neo Swee Lin, Cynthia Lee Macquarrie and Vivek Gomber.
As a certain Oscar Wilde might sum it up: The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
The Truth runs from Apr 3-20 at KC Arts Centre. Tickets start from $35 here.
