Farewell Mister Haffmann, Park Theatre review - French hit of confusing genre, with a real historical villain

When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again.

This is a story set in Occupied Paris, from May 1942 to VE Day in 1945. In the exodus of French Jews, Joseph Haffmann’s wife and children have reached Geneva. But he has stayed put to wind up his jewellery business and hatch his own escape plan: which is to sign over his shop to his trusted assistant, Pierre (Michael Fox), while he hides in the cellar. Pierre accepts this plan, but on one condition: Mr Haffmann (Alex Waldmann) has to service his wife once a month to get her pregnant, as he is sterile. He hasn’t consulted her about this idea, and she is understandably reluctant and appalled, though ultimately acquiescent.

Can this premise be taken seriously anywhere outside comic fiction? The plan proceeds, but the tone is uncertain. Pierre’s wife Isabelle (Jennifer Kirby) is allowed moments of disquiet as the first tryst approaches, while Pierre releases his anxiety in bouts of tap-dancing. What Haffmann truly thinks, we don’t find out. His life has been upended, his future endangered, and he could be forgiven some howls of despair, but there are few signs of these, barring a brief sequence where he dances dreamily wih his absent wife (pictured above). The plot trots along, part bedroom farce, part comedy of manners, part tense drama, criss-crossing lanes. 

Into the third act of this odd brew Daguerre has thrown some non-fictitious people, notably Otto Abetz (Nigel Harman), the notorious German appointed by Hitler as ambassador to the Vichy government. Abetz was a Francophile with a blowsy French wife, Suzanne (Amanda Rooper), who managed to seize thousands of paintings from Jewish collections. Notable among them were those of the dealer Paul Rosenberg, who had fled Paris for New York, leaving some works behind with friends – of whom Joseph Haffmann is purportedly one. But did it ever happen that a Jewish man, as late as May 1942, openly displayed on his wall a well klnown Matisse donated by a well known Jewish dealer friend?

Even more unlikely is the denouement of the piece two years later, fuelled by a dinner party Isabelle is obliged to throw in her kitchen for the Abetzes, now prized customers of Pierre’s, whose business is flourishing. Suzanne arrives in a fur coat and a shop window’s worth of sparklies, including one of Pierre’s now-famous necklaces, the must-have purchase of Nazi bigwigs. So with the Germans losing ground daily, the battle for Stalingrad lost and the Free French at the gates, Pierre is nailing his colours to the Nazi mast and making himself and Isabelle a potential target for accusations of collaborationism. His thinking is that hosting a Jew will wipe out his sins. And all of this is washed down with fine wines, suckling pig and crude jokes involving Paris-Brest cakes and the C-word. 

This last big scene is fun in places, teetering between thriller and farce. But there are large areas of darkness that sit uncomfortably alongside it. The real Abetz was a Nazi theoriser who created a popular exhibition, “The Jew and France”, tracing the corrupting of French culture by the Jews; sentiments that radio stations were happy to air in Lord Haw-Haw-like lectures. We hear Pierre and Isabelle listening to snatches of them in their kitchen. Daguerre himself had found transcripts of these shocking antisemitic lectures and says he was inspired to write the play by them. But he just drops them into the action, unremarked upon, until it eventually becomes clear that Pierre, who no longer calls Haffmann by his first name, is starting to believe their calumnies, denying the reality around him. 

Big historical events aside, there is other substantial material to plunder here, such as exploring the way an infertile husband virtually pimps his wife for the sake of gaining a child; how he copes with her having monthly sex with somebody under his roof; how he views the couple’s blossoming friendship. Daguerre gives Pierre little to express on the subject other than a curiosity about Haffmann’s performance in bed. His feelings are more obviously expressed in his manic tap-dancing (pictured, left with Waldmann and Kirby). Fox does his best to present us with a driven, money-obsessed man, but he’s not a character allowed enough nuance by the script. And welcome though the tap-dancing is, it’s the only surreal touch in the staging. 

Jennifer Kirby has a happier time, giving Isabelle a spine and a much more rounded character: this is a woman torn, initially, between wanting to make her husband happy, and revulsion at the means of achieving it. Kirby grounds the production despite being given slim means by the script for achieving that. No one character is the focus of the narrative, not even poor Mr Haffmann, whose misery is a background event we have to accept as a given. As a result, when his feelings eventually erupt, it’s unprepared for by the script.

Into this arena steps the big-beast Nazi, Harman’s Abetz. He’s predictably dangerous from the outset, smiling and sinister, his teeth unfeasibly white; as his wife, Rooper is turned up to 11 throughout. It’s almost panto comedy. But simultaneously we are asked to acknowledge what vicious antisemites they are, and then to accept an almost happy ending. 

The variable tone of this production points to the difficulty that comes with projecting this material to a British audience. Jeremy Sams’s translation keeps the mood relatively jolly and sends the audience home happy, but that’s the problem: it’s often too jauntily British in tone, and the characters aren’t recognisably residents of Occupied Paris, except for Kirby’s gutsy Isabelle. Perhaps the piece needs to be in French with surtitles? Director Oscar Toeman steers its comedy away from outright cliché, but its humour and psychology need to be darker, more surreal and much subtler, if it is to sit in the shadow of the holocaust.

• Farewell Mister Haffmann, Park Theatre until 12 April
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