24 August – 23 September
The Ustinov is at it again, bringing us some of the very best European drama. If you’ve seen a better play this year it will have had to be very, very good indeed. Having garnered much-deserved plaudits in France and Israel this play by Jean-Philippe Daguerre is thrown open to the English speaking world in a translation by Jeremy Sams.
The playwright seems to have taken an intolerable scenario and thought to himself, ‘How can I make the situation worse for those involved?’ Set in occupied Paris during the Second World War it tells the story of a talented jeweler whose Jewish employer, Joseph Haffmann (Nigel Lindsay) proposes that he, Pierre Vigneau (Ciarán Owens) takes over the ownership of the jewellery business until such time as the mephitic cloud of Nazism was blown away and it would be safe for Jews again to own businesses in France.
Heaped onto the mental ordure that is Nazism, Daguerre lays the anguish of a loving husband who is unable to provide his wife with a child. The answer is simple: his employer has successfully produced offspring who are now safely in Switzerland, so in return for protecting the business, Joseph should remove the sadness in his wife’s eye that comes from being childless. Things are of course never so simple and the mental strain, the complexity of his love for his wife, knowing she is being serviced by another man as he tries to tap dance the image from his mind, prove near fatal to the marriage. However, as Chaucer’s nun has it ‘Amor vincit omnia’.
Mr Owens and Ms Dillon explore the trajectory of the arrangement with insight and subtlety. Lindsay Posner’s direction is astute and detailed with a sharp eye for the nuances of the situation. A brand of flippant gallows humour, prompted by the absurdity of the situation, runs through the play, seemingly springing naturally from the characters’ awkwardness. Here Mr Owens is exceptional, his well meaning, gauche character finds himself in an emotional cul-de-sac from which there is no about-turn. Ms Dillon, as his no less devoted wife, Isabelle, shows us a woman conflicted by the emotional, moral and biological pressures of her situation.
Mr Lindsay as the eponymous jeweler is similarly conflicted. Being a loving husband and father, the erotic possibilities of the situation could not be further from his mind. He shows us a man of dignity and strength.
The play explores complex moral dilemmas whipped up with an emotional challenge few would like to contemplate. Again, how an individual with odious political and racial views can come to be seen as acceptable because of other traits of character is a subject baked into our culture. Or when is collaborating (could it ever be) acceptable? Alexander Hanson as Otto Abetz, the German Envoy in charge of Paris, intelligently paints a louche and repellent excuse for a cultivated individual, the embodiment of a tumbrel driver, slyly leading his prey to their doom. His wife Suzanne (Josefina Gabrielle) an arrogant, snobbish anti-Semite and toper gives us the most tense of wine tastings, suffused with jeopardy one is likely to find in a theatre.
The ironically titled Farewell Mr Haffmann is a play that has so much and yet remains tight and apparently spare thanks to the setting, Pierre’s apartment above Mr Haffmann’s jewellery shop, and compassionate acting intelligently directed.
★★★★★ Graham Wyles, 1 September 2023
Photo credit: Simon Annand
