'Farewell Mister Haffmann' review — Nigel Harman is eerily commanding as a Nazi official in this French wartime drama

Read our review of Jean-Philippe Daguerre's play Farewell Mister Haffmann, now in performances at the Park Theatre to 12 April.

Trade-offs don’t get much stranger than the one on view in Farewell Mister Haffmann, which has arrived in London following a separate English-language production 18 months ago in Bath; the play previously won four Molière Awards in its author Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s native France, and was filmed in 2021.

It’s Paris, 1942, during the Nazi occupation, and a Jewish jeweller, Joseph Haffmann (Alex Waldmann), has decided to bequeath his shop to a gentile colleague, Pierre Vigneau (Michael Fox), while Joseph sequesters himself away in the basement.

So far so Diary of Anne Frank-adjacent, or so you might think, but no. Pierre accepts the deal with the unlikely proviso that Joseph agree to regular sex with Pierre’s wife, Isabelle (Jennifer Kirby), in order that Joseph might sire the child which Pierre, who is sterile, could not.

Zut alors! Joseph and his (unseen) wife have four children, so his priapic skills are self-evident, and if Isabelle is reported to carry with her “a little sadness”, well, at least this schoolmaster’s daughter can prepare for the family that she has hitherto been denied.

Having broached the arrangement in the first place, Pierre succumbs to (understandable) anxiety which he communicates in sudden bursts of tap dancing (the movement and intimacy director is Christina Fulcher). Those, in turn, slow the momentum of Oscar Toeman’s production, performed without an interval.

Indeed, much of the first hour proceeds more or less as a series of snapshots: vignettes of life spent in hiding or in hope, the darkening shadows of Christopher Nairne’s lighting suggesting a society at large given over to rot and ruin.

It’s some while before we get to the properly extended scene which also brings with it the production’s major strength – 2012 Olivier Award winner Nigel Harman’s eerily commanding supporting performance as Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to the Vichy government, who shows up for dinner alongside his wife, Suzanne (Jemima Rooper): real-life characters brought in to mix amongst the fictional.

Avuncular but clearly authoritative, Harman’s Otto lends suspense and focus to a production that never quite seems to find its tone: are we watching some sort of wayward bedroom farce, or an admonitory study in the stealthy accretion of evil? Rooper’s vulgarian of a wife is pitched so broadly that you wonder why in heaven’s name Otto has stuck with her, and the dinner scene’s catalogue of revelations plays like a more sober-sided variant to a similar gathering in La Cage aux Folles.

Jeremy Sams, the translator, has form with the French repertoire, whether one thinks of Michel Legrand (Amour, the musical) or Jean Cocteau (Broadway’s Indiscretions), and it’s no surprise that these characters both reference – and go to – the theatre. One wonders, though, what they might say were they to attend this very play, whose portrait of a community under siege certainly has resonances for today.

Asaf Zohar’s sound design makes evident the intensifying Nazi threat, and you feel for people who are seen to fall back on familiar aphorisms when their everyday reality may be too harsh for comfort. Waldmann’s dismay at his unusual situation is certainly vivid, and Kirby brings a peppery sense of self to a woman none too keen to be simply an object of sex. But it’s left to Harman to bring intrigue and alarm to a Farewell that ought to be more memorable than it is.

Farewell Mister Haffmann is at the Park Theatre to 12 April. Book Farewell Mister Haffmann tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Farewell Mister Haffmann (Photos by Mark Senior)