Farewell Mister Haffmann – Park Theatre, London

Writer: Jean-Philipe Daguerre (Translated by Jeremy Sams)

Director: Oscar Toeman

Park Theatre’s second play this month to open in 1942 is the London premiere of Jean-Philipe Daguerre’s Moliére-Award-winning play Farewell Mister Haffmann. For most of its running time, it is an intense but also comic three-hander about the nature and cost of betrayal in which two indecent proposals are made in the first few minutes that shape the action to come. But it is the arrival of two further guests in the final 20 minutes that brings the play to life, indicating that the real drama was here all along.

Translated by Jeremy Sams and directed by Oscar Toeman, the play begins with a bargain. The titular Joseph Haffmann asks worker Pierre to take over and rename his successful jewellery business while he hides in the cellar from the Nazis. In return, the impotent Pierre asks Joseph to impregnate his wife Isabelle. After years of trying, occupied Paris becomes increasingly dangerous and everyone starts to take unnecessary risks.

The final scene in which a Nazi and his French wife appear – superbly played by underused stars Nigel Harman and Jemima Rooper – seems to have far more to offer this scenario than the few moments it is given in Daguerre’s text which selects a tension-loaded dinner-party as the confrontational moment when characters are faced with a choice to stand up for each other or to quietly accept the status quo.

Until this point, the war has raged outside of Rebecca Brower’s home-based set which contains the living quarters of Pierre and Isabelle as well as the cellar room in which Joseph is confined, but the focus has been entirely on the unusual ménage à trois taking place inside. For more than an hour, these unhappy housemates are filled with not-so-petty jealousies and there are interesting strands of drama here that could be better explored as “the artisan and the artist” trade their most precious possessions.

Daguerre’s play could do much more with Pierre’s Woody Harrelson-style guilt and shame as he hands over his wife to another man while Joseph’s equivalent resentment of another man not only running but making a success of his renamed business and taking Nazi money to do it, could bring more jeopardy to the question of what will really be handed back at the end of the war.

Equally, Pierre’s growing closeness to local officer Otto Abetz takes him through a Good-style repositioning of his character and, for a time there is much to compare with C.P. Taylor’s play about the incremental move towards the darker involvements that Pierre enters into, perhaps merely out of spite and sexual envy although his motive is never fully articulated. This is why the dinner party scene becomes so vital, a culmination point where all of these undercurrents spill out in the presence of the wrong people. If only it were longer; as the guests hasten through the courses and the awkwardness you long for the tension to be drawn out and for the characters to skirt an even greater betrayal before their humanity restores them.

Michael Fox as Pierre, Jennifer Kirby as Isabelle and Alex Waldmann as Joseph build real connection, upping the stakes the longer the war goes on while Harman and Rooper wait a very long time to come onstage but bring fireworks when they do. But it is a shame that the moment the trio really put themselves in danger isn’t fully utilised because it makes Farewell Mister Haffmann a good play but not a great one.

Runs until12 April 2025