A STRANGE WARTIME FABLE OF LIFE, BIRTH AND JEWELLERY
In a little Jeweller’s shop in 1942 Paris Joseph Haffmann is making a deal with his young assistant Pierre. He is Jewish, and has prudently managed to get his wife and children out to Switzerland . His proposal is that Pierre should take over the shop, put his name over it and hide his boss (who can keep the accountancy and admin going) , in the cellar . Until things get back to what he almost believes is ‘normal’. Pierre thinks it over and suddenly makes a counter-proposal: he has been found to be infertile, but he and his beloved wife Isabelle long for a child, so maybe Haffmann, father of four, should…step in and impregnate her?
The other two are of course thunderstruck and resistant. But they both at last agree. Improbable? Perhaps, but all in separate conversations a -deux say that they are “not in their normal state of mind” , and indeed the strength of the play is that it does evoke the claustrophobic, frightened mentality you might come to when the world is turned upside down by Occupation. The play is all set in one little home, with just the trio for the first two-thirds of its tight 100 minutes, which underlines the transgressive oddity of the trio’s lives. Pierre’s hobby is learning tap-dancing, and during the monthly encounters downstairs of his wife and Joseph – the pair dim, inexplicit, in the background – he hurls himself into tremendous tap routines.
That may sound contrived, but actually the dance’s energy and absurdity is no bad way of expressing the act of congress, and Pierre’s increasing unhappiness with the situation he has set up is there in every deafening stamp, tap, shuffle and hop. He is affronted when Isabelle starts helping Joseph to get messages from Switzerland from his family, receiving disguised letters. At one point – because the jewellery business is doing very well and selling to rich Nazi collaborator wives – the young man starts to believe that it’s all true about Jews taking over and poisoning France, because his cuckoldry is poisoning him.
Below, Alex Waldmann’s dignified, lonely Joseph gradually grows more dishevelled, untidier, sadder; Isabelle weeps as she continues to bleed each month, the enterprise failing. And then into this uneasy household guests are invited: real characters from history. Otto Abetz was Hitler’s powerful ‘ambassador” and his French wife. They’re invited to dinner as a “business matter” by the now deeply unsettled Pierre and you will rarely see a more tensely devastating sitcom dinner party on stage. Especially as the Jew from the cellar suddenly puts on a good suit and walks in, insisting on joining it under the flimsy pretext of being “cousin Jean” visiting from Caen.
British audiences have got used lately to the unsettling playfulness of French playwrights, especially when messing about with domestic settings : think of Yazmina Reza’s Art or anything – dark or light – by Florian Zeller. Jean-Phillipe Daguerre shows himself to be of their ilk, capable of buckling together a sex comedy , Nazi jeopardy, transactional business matters, a lost Matisse painting and a subtle psychological drama . It has had long-running success at home, and been a film: this is its London premiere, and it is piquant to see it on the heels of the Marylebone Theatre’s WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK, with its devastating finale about the question of which friend would have hidden you from the Nazis.
But it’s utterly gripping, and sharp at the edges despite the absurdities: it opens with Haffmann listening in a dim-lit office to the radio polemic about how Jews must wear yellow stars because “not everyone knows how to recognize one”, and explaining as if to children that these awful Jews are dangerous because they suck the wealth out of France. Daguerre takes the words verbatim from real broadcasts, and they chill, deeply because of the announcer’s educated and friendly words.
No spoilers, because you really don’t need to know in advance whether this situation ends in extreme darkness or not, but know from its tone that it might, especially in the last twenty minutes. The performances are all fine, under director Oscar Toeman from the Old Vic, and the translation by Jeremy Sams is neat and sharp. Waldmann as Joseph is particularly powerful , especially in his quietness; Michael Fox endearingly young and confused as Pierre, Jennifer Kirby a strong, central female presence as his wife. And as for the Nazi dinner-guests, Nigel Harman is quietly terrifying, and Jemima Rooper artfully credible as his heartless socialite party-girl French wife, the ultimate collaboratrice. Brrr.
Worth mentioning that I had to travel specially, wasn’t at all sure I would take to it, but gloriously did. I should have trusted the little Park Theatre, which does not often disappoint.
Parktheatre.co.uk. To 12 April
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