Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“It’s farcical,” says Isabelle partway through Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Farewell Mister Haffmann. She’s talking about her situation — but she could be talking about the play, which boldly uses black comedy to examine the Nazi occupation of France. It’s a risky move and the set-up feels overly contrived. Yet as the play continues, Daguerre’s approach pays off, becoming a way of distilling the moral dilemmas of living under a fascist regime. Jeremy Sams’ nippy, colloquial translation includes genuine, sickeningly antisemitic French radio broadcasts, and Oscar Toeman’s production deftly builds up to a terrifying climactic scene.The play (which has won multiple awards in France) was inspired by Daguerre’s discovery that his French great-grandparents hid Polish Jews in their cellar. It focuses on Joseph Haffmann, a Jewish jeweller living in Paris, who in 1942 has sent his family to Switzerland and is preparing to go into hiding. He asks his Catholic assistant Pierre to conceal him in the cellar and take over the business. Pierre agrees — on one condition. Joseph must help Pierre by sleeping with his wife and fathering the child she longs for.As this deeply uncomfortable ménage unfolds, stretching into months, then years, it becomes entangled with the bigger nightmare. Joseph (Alex Waldmann) and Isabelle (Jennifer Kirby) — both quietly and subtly desolate in their own ways — grow closer while Pierre (Michael Fox) becomes increasingly jealous and manic. Meanwhile, he keep’s his Jewish friend’s business alive by selling necklaces to Nazis — an irony he eventually voices, bitterly. The play raises complex questions about courage, compromise, humanity and identity, and about what we are prepared to do in extremis. While expressing the grim absurdity of the situation, the brittle comedy doesn’t leave room to explore these issues in enough depth and nuance. But it comes into its own in a brilliantly nasty final scene, in which German ambassador Otto Abetz (Nigel Harman) and his wife Suzanne (Jemima Rooper) come round for dinner. As Rooper’s enjoyably ghastly Suzanne gets riotously drunk, Harman’s chilling Otto toys with his hosts’ fear, winding up to a devastating mic-drop moment.Handled with expert timing by Toeman and the cast, it makes a riveting ending, using comedy and dread to create an electric sense of danger. And Abetz’s remark that he joined the Nazi party because he fell in love with Hitler’s “vision” carries its own chill in today’s climate. ★★★☆☆To April 12, parktheatre.co.uk
