Farewell Mister Haffmann at the Park Theatre – review

One can easily imagine the idea for Jean-Phillipe Daguerre’s Farewell Mister Haffmann being pitched in a cynical Netflix meeting: Ok, what about Indecent Proposal, but make it Holocaust.

In Paris, 1942, having already successfully smuggled his wife and children out of the country, the time has come for Joseph Haffmann (played by Alex Waldmann) to save himself. He turns to his long-time employee Pierre Vigneau (Michael Fox), asking him to take over the business and residence, and hide him in the cellar.

Pierre and his wife Isabelle (Jennifer Kirby) long to start a family, but Pierre has discovered that he is sterile. So, in return for hiding Mr Haffmann, Pierre asks that he sleep with his wife once a cycle; given that he already has four children of his own, he must have the good stuff. Obviously, chaos ensues.

Oscar Toeman’s direction has the three leads rarely leaving the stage, even in scenes they don’t participate in, creating a sense of the claustrophobic atmosphere, both for Joseph, hiding in his own basement, and the Vigneaus, stashing a Jew and their sperm donor downstairs while serving Nazis upstairs.

Jeremy Sams’ translation gives the script a quippy, contemporary feel. In fact, some scenes feel dangerously close to a Michael Frayn farce. Fox shines particularly bright in these more comical moments, lending a jaunty swagger to a clunky setup. Jemima Rooper and Nigel Harman both play Nazis a la Tarantino, maniacal laughter becoming a hard, cold stare, only to be broken again by another explosion of laughter, and so on. It’s affectively unnerving, if derivative.

But that’s the problem with this whole plot: Daguerre himself tells us in his programme interview that the main crux of the story is Pierre and Isabelle’s desperate need for a child, “and how far they were prepared to go”. And in order to press the tension, he has set it during the Nazi occupation. So, instead of a fully fleshed storyline, we have what could have been a fairly interesting idea – how far would you go to make a family? – plonked into a sea of WWII tropes. There must have been a hundred other ways to explain the situation Pierre and Isabelle find themselves in, but setting it during the Occupation is lazy and emotionally manipulative.

By the end, in a frenzy towards the story’s conclusion, Daguerre has a big Nazi showdown in which Haffmann is nearly caught, and Pierre and Isabelle save the day, sort of. In fact, the main plot, and most interesting part of the story – the couple’s ineradicable need for a child – is left unresolved, and all we learn is that you shouldn’t have Nazis over for dinner.