Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s play was inspired by his learning that his great-grandparents hid Polish Jews in their home in southern France during the second world war. It scooped French theatre awards and was made into a film starring Daniel Auteuil, but in its English-language premiere emerges as oddly contrived, the terrors of persecution sidelined by an overelaborate plot.
As the Nazis enter France, Joseph Haffmann (Nigel Lindsay) sends his family to Switzerland, handing his jewellery shop over to his non-Jewish assistant, Pierre Vigneau (Ciarán Owens). He has one condition: that Pierre lets him hide there until normality returns. Pierre has his own stipulation: unable to have children, he asks Joseph to get his wife, Isabelle, (Lisa Dillon, tensely pragmatic) pregnant.
Neither Joseph nor Isabelle relish this situation – she trotting down once a month to the cellar where he hides out – but the comedy of mortification sits oddly with the danger pressing in on the household. In Lindsay Posner’s production, rallies, gunfire and goosesteps ring out between scenes, but peril doesn’t emerge in the writing nor Jeremy Sams’s glassy translation.
Much of the 90-minute play is a rattle of abrupt scenes, shuttling between Haffmann’s cellar and the Vigneaus’ kitchen: on Paul Wills’s set they’re divided by a simple line of chalk. As months pass without conception, unrelaxed nightly dinners founder in awkward silences and maladroit chatter. “Our situation is dramatic,” Isabelle complains. “I mean, it’s farcical.”
The shop thrives under Pierre’s direction, becoming a favourite with (real-life) Nazi ambassador Otto Abetz (Alexander Hanson, suave and creepy). As Pierre flourishes, the initially timorous Owens grows taller, and meaner. Pierre ingratiates himself with Abetz, inviting the Francophile ambassador and his wife (a raucously tactless Josefina Gabrielle) to dinner. The table sits on the chalk divide, a faultline threatening to crack beneath fine wine and sucking-pig – Gabrielle greedily wrenches off its ears and crunchy tail.
Leading a seasoned cast, Lindsay is delicately withheld, anguish piercing his apparent affability. But however poignant his situation, and the tales of fear and courage that inspired it, what really confines these characters are the demands of Daguerre’s plot and its awkward comic veneer.
Farewell Mr Haffmann is at Ustinov Studio, Bath, until 23 September
