Farewell Mister Haffmann at Park Theatre review: this Nazi farce is brutally, depressingly, absurd

The premise is brutally absurd. In occupied Paris in 1942, Jewish jeweller Joseph Haffmann offers to transfer his business to his gentile employee Pierre Vigneau, if Pierre will conceal him from the Nazis. Pierre’s counter-offer is to announce he is sterile and insist Joseph impregnates his wife Isabelle.

Sweeping comparisons are made between the subsequent sexual jealousy Pierre feels and the moral accommodations he makes to thrive under fascism. Interesting ideas about the way ethnicity and authenticity are commodified and policed are buried in a pileup of farcical developments. This culminates in a dinner of suckling pig for the disguised Haffmann (“there’s always a first time!”), the Vigneaus and cartoonish versions of Hitler’s real-life ambassador to Paris Otto Abetz and his cacklingly vulgar French wife. It’s all played jarringly for laughs.

Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s play was a hit in France, won four Moliere awards and was made into a film with Daniel Auteuil in 2022, but maybe something’s got lost in translation. The acrid jollity feels forced in Oscar Toeman’s stilted London premiere, that’s chasing the coat-tails of a starrier but ambivalently received production in Bath in 2023.

A programme interview tells us Daguerre was inspired by his grandparents, who hid Polish Jews during the war, and by contemporary friends heartbroken by their inability to conceive. But there’s no real sense of the existential threat to Alex Waldmann’s overly boyish Joseph, or of the baby-hunger supposedly consuming the Vigneaus. The bizarre pact is forged in mild sitcom discomfiture.

The clownishly gangling Pierre (Michael Fox – no, not the Back to the Future star) goes out to dance lessons while Jennifer Kirby’s stiffly unemotional Isabelle is with Joseph. We’re therefore treated to the lovers in tango clinches while he performs ever more frantic (and admittedly impressive) tap routines, to the sound of Nazi rallies.

The translation is by the usually supple Jeremy Sams: did he just surrender in the face of endlessly laboured Brest/breast puns and lines about Pierre having “fingers of magic and a heart of gold”, I wonder? Was it him or Daguerre who repeatedly has Pierre tell his wife they will “find a solution” to the arrangement with Joseph, that can’t help but echo the Nazis’ “final solution”?

It all feels pretty lumpen and obvious before Nigel Harman and Jemima Rooper turn up as Herr and Frau Abetz, having presumably twiddled their thumbs for the first two-thirds of this 90-minute drama. He reels off Hitlerian screeds with a stiff jaw and a cold eye, and she’s the raucous embodiment of acquisitive collaboration. Okay, we get it. The Nazis were the bad guys, yeah?

I think Daguerre’s play is blunt and crass but I also think there’s stuff in it that Toeman sees but can’t express. What does it mean if Nazis buy necklaces made by a gentile but inspired by a Jew? Where does ethnicity and culture reside if a child is not biologically your own?

Comparisons between antisemitism in the 1940s and contemporary Islamophobia are inescapable but laid on with a trowel. The final revelation is given away far in advance and the ending is a damp squib. Disappointing.

Park Theatre, to April 12; parktheatre.co.uk