Farewell Mr Haffmann
Ustinov Theatre | ★★★✩ ✩

The plight of Jews in occupied Paris is central to Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s French hit of 2018 which won four Molière awards in France. Yet despite first appearances it is not Jews or France’s history of antisemitism, collaboration and (some) resistance with which this French playwright is fascinated. Rather it is the decisions people make under extraordinary pressure that interests Daguerre.

In the case of Joseph Haffman (Nigel Lindsay), the Jewish owner of a Parisian jewellery shop, the decision forced upon him is to save his business by handing it over to his loyal Catholic employee Pierre (Ciarán Owens). Meanwhile, Pierre has his own reluctant request, to make up for his infertility by asking Joseph to impregnate his wife Isabelle (Lisa Dillon) and so bring about the much longed for pregnancy made impossible by Pierre’s infertility.

And Isabelle’s decision? Well, using a stranger’s sperm is all very embarrassing in the days before IVF (the turkey baster method is never mentioned). But as with Joseph’s jewellery business, needs must in the business of having a child.

So as Joseph hides in his basement while his fellow Parisian Jews are rounded up for the camps, the jeweller dutifully apologises to pictures of his wife and children who have escaped to Switzerland, places their photos in a drawer and accepts the request to help Pierre and Isabelle become parents.

This fictional story is set against a real life backdrop populated by historical figures. Prominent among these is Berlin’s Nazi ambassador to France Otto Abetz, an art lover who made it his business to “liberate” great paintings from Jewish ownership including masters owned by the renowned Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg.

However the melding of real life figures such as Abetz (Alexander Hanson) and his wife Suzanne (Josefina Gabrielle) with Daguerre’s fictional characters is not wholly successful.

When Abetz, a regular customer of what is now Pierre’s jewellery shop, is invited to dinner it takes a fair amount of disbelief to credit Joseph’s chutzpah in joining the dinner while pretending to be Pierre’s cousin.

As persistent as these doubts is the nagging feeling that as emotional charged as Pierre and Isabelle’s yearning for a baby is, Daguerre’s decision to set the story in occupied France was made in order to give his fictional plot much needed heft. A tweak to the setting and this could so easily have been a comedy of manners.

Still, like all encounters between Jews and Nazis the dinner scene is taut with tension and excellently played by this quality cast. They are so good in fact that for most of this play’s uninterrupted 90 minutes they suppress the sense of a dark history being conscripted to serve a relatively trite story. Though ultimately that sense never goes away.