Park Theatre, til 12 April 2025

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Punchy comedic drama puts an absurd new spin on the horrors of the holocaust.

If you think you’ve already seen every possible storytelling angle on WWII, Farewell Mister Haffman wants you to hold its beer. The play starts in a familiar way, with Jewish Mister Haffman (Joseph) listening to an ominous radio broadcast in Nazi-occupied France. Having already sent his family to Switzerland, he seeks asylum in his own house, asking his Catholic assistant Pierre to deflect suspicion by taking over his jeweller’s shop, “just until things settle down.” It seems like the typical premise we’ve seen before in various WWII dramas, until Pierre makes his counter-offer: having struggled for many years to conceive a much-wanted child with his beloved wife Isabelle, he asks if father-of-four Joseph can assist by impregnating her. Thus begins a most unusual house-share set-up, where the chaos and horror of the world outside is only compounded by the uncomfortable dynamics between the three unlikely (literal) bedfellows. 

It’s undoubtedly a ludicrous premise, and the play is weakest in the early scenes when it rushes through deliberations between the three leads that really should be more fleshed out if the audience is expected to accept that anybody would agree to this arrangement in the first place. But of course we need the play to, you know, happen, so the proposal must be agreed upon. Suspending disbelief on this front this is well worth the mental effort, because what follows is a play that’s hilarious, thoughtful and very, very moving.

Playwright Jean-Phillipe Daguerre doesn’t shy away from the discomfort of the situation, which he both plays for laughs and mines for dramatic potential. The obvious awkwardness between Joseph and Isabelle, neither of whom has had a sexual partner before their spouse, offers plenty of cringe humour. But the intensity of their circumstances and the ultimate purity of their intentions create moments of tenderness too. Joseph understands the stakes of what he might be able to give Pierre and (more particularly) Isabelle – the hope he presents – and this inevitably binds him to Isabelle in a peculiar and specific way. Though I found Pierre’s discomfort at the situation a little tedious at times (you can’t help wanting to yell “it was your idea!”), the shifting dynamics between the three characters are certainty interesting and Daguerre does well to avoid falling into simplistic tropes (for example, turning Pierre and Isabelle’s connection into something stereotypically romantic).

Particularly clever is Daguerre’s use of the ethically dubious agreement as an exploration of social power structures more broadly. Pierre becomes jealous of Joseph for his connection to his wife, but as Isabelle points out, in a world where Joseph’s people are being hunted and killed, Pierre is the one who holds all the power. The characters explicitly question their own morals, such as in one scene where Pierre and Joseph both wonder what they would have done if the other had refused the terms of the deal. It’s unsaid but understood that while the consequences for Pierre would have been tragic, for Joseph they would have been fatal.  Further muddying the ethical waters are Pierre’s increasing business dealings with the Nazis, which appals both Joseph and Isabelle (marking another interesting shift in the fault lines between the three). Here again Daguerre deftly mixes the dramatic with the comedic, as Pierre responds to Joseph’s moralising with: “Taking money off the Nazis to feed the Jew in my basement might not be very dignified, but it is pretty funny!”

That morbid, tense sense of humour carries through to the play’s final and best scene, in which Pierre and Isabelle must welcome a Nazi commander and his odious French wife into the house for dinner. Without giving too much away about how the scene plays out, the farce escalates to new heights, providing the story with a climax that’s hilarious and nail-biting. 

Farewell Mister Haffman is brought to life by magnificent performances from the three lead cast members. Jennifer Kirby creates a wonderfully dignified and compassionate Isabelle, and Michael Fox is boyish but sympathetic as Pierre (and executes some really excellent choreography that I thought was a clever inclusion). But the standout is Alex Waldmann as Joseph. Joseph is clearly the most anguished of the three, caged and broken in spirit as he desperately grieves the absence of his wife and children. Waldmann captures this pain and anger but never at the expense of Joseph’s inherent gentleness and humility. 

Amongst mostly strong scenes there are some dialogue exchanges that I think are slightly on the weak side, though that might be down to the translation from the French original, done by Jeremy Sams. On the whole Oscar Toeman’s production is a sound one. The overbearing music (Asaf Zohar) and the set design (Rebecca Brower), featuring a solitary high window allowing only a hint of daylight into Joseph’s prison, encapsulate the dread that he must live constantly alongside. Fear, he says, “is my cellmate.” 

Farewell Mister Haffman clocks in at only 90 minutes and while some of the early scenes might need a little more time to breathe, overall its brevity only makes the humour (and the pathos) punchier. If you only see one play this year about a hidden French Jew impregnating the wife of his jewellery shop assistant, make it this one.

Visit the Park Theatre website for tickets to Farewell Mister Haffman.