By Jean-Philippe Gaguerre
Translated by Jeremy Sams
Directed by Lindsay Posner
Designed by Paul Wills
Composer / Sound Design by Giles Thomas
Bath Ustinov Studio
Thursday 14th September 2023, 14.30
CAST
Lisa Dillon – Isabelle Vigneau
Josefina Gabrielle – Suzanne Abetz
Alexander Hanson – Otto Abetz
Nigel Lindsay – Joseph Haffman
Ciaran Owens – Pierre Vigneau
The play Adieu Monsieur Hoffman won four Moliere awards in France in 2018. It’s directed by Lindsay Posner, who directed the highly successful Florian Zeller plays, which also starred Alexander Hanson. Add Lisa Dillon, Ciaron Owens, Nigel Lindsay and Josefina Gabrielle and this is a top level cast in a tiny 120 seat studio theatre (which is where the Florian Zeller plays became known). It is played at 95 minutes without an interval.
It takes place in 1942 in Paris. Joseph Haffman is Jewish and is a successful jeweller. He has managed to get his wife and children out of France to Switzerland. However, the yellow star has arrived. Identity cards were stamped, and he cannot follow. He has employed Pierre Vigneau, a gentile, for ten years and decides to give him the shop and change its name from Haffman to Vigneau. His request is that Pierre and his wife Isabelle move into the premises, and that they let him hide in the cellar. Pierre is sterile and he makes a reciprocal request. Haffman has four children. He wants Haffman to have sex with Isabelle once a month on the appropriate day so they can have a baby. Neither Joseph not Isabelle relish the task at all – this is played with enormous subtlety by the quietly dignified older Nigel Lindsay and a mortified Lisa Dillon. Over the dozen years I’ve been reviewing I can’t think I’ve seen a better female actor than Lisa Dillon.
On the appointed day. Pierre will either go to tap dancing lessons or watch a film. He tap dances furiously in a spotlight which becomes a soundtrack. Pierre is fighting intense jealousy but is insistent that Joseph and Isabelle continue to try month after month. He becomes frenetic. Ciaran Owens gives one of the most memorable performances of this year.
Meanwhile Pierre’s new designs have invigorated the shop. They are selling more and more jewellery. It is obvious that the French have no money, so the customers are the German occupiers. Also Pierre has become friendly with the German Ambassador, Otto Abetz, and his French wife Suzanne. Isabelle deeply disapproves.
L to R: Ciaran Owens, Josefina Gabrielle, Alexander Hanson, Nigel Lindsay, Lisa Dillon
He invites the Germans to dinner. To the astonishment of all, Joseph says he will attend, in the guise of Pierre’s cousin Jean from Le Mans, because he wants to see how far Pierre will go in arse-licking the occupiers. I don’t think I can go further without plot spoilers, but the wine tasting scene … Pierre has found a precious 1924 vintage Bordeaux … is very funny. The dish is suckling pig. The play is not a comedy but it is witty and there are some very funny lines.
The stage is divided into two areas by lighting. The stage right is the Haffman office, then becomes the cellar with bed where Joseph lives. Stage left starts as the Vigneau house, then simply by adding Joseph’s radio, becomes the living room over the shop. The two areas are combined for the dining scene. The scenes are mainly very short and switch rapidly with blackouts. These five stellar actors operate as stage hands too, moving the furniture and placing the props between scenes. One reviewer found the amount of scene changing clunky. I didn’t. Like the bare rafters of the rear stage, it was a fictive device. It worked. We know it’s a play.
The soundtrack is most important. The radio. Shouting from streets, jackboots marching, then Pierre’s increasingly frenzied and faster tap dancing sound represents (I think) intercourse.
The Ustinov is an uncomfortable theatre. The steep rake means brilliant eye lines in an intimate space but you’re sitting on benches for three people with as limited leg room as you’ll ever find. Yet we survived ninety minutes without fidgeting because the play so held our attention. It is a tribute to the acting from all five that you can’t imagine anyone else doing the parts. Alexander Hanson’s Nazi is smoothly urbane which makes him more chilling. We are told he is a Francophile and speaks perfect French, which means no ‘stage-Nazi’ accents. When he suddenly breaks into rage … and German … it is a tremendous shock. Josefina Gabrielle’s blowsy, crude, drunken fur-coated French wife is another great creation.
The play is beautifully constructed, so no wonder it won so many prizes and has run so long in France. It also touches the rawest of nerves in France. First is the extent of collaboration with the German occupiers in World War Two. The jewellery business with the Germans represents this.
Second, is the deep vein of organized anti-Semitism in France which is heard in ranting radio broadcasts in the play. Go back to the Dreyfus case … Robert Harris’s An Officer and A Spy is the fictional version to read. The French were more enthusiastic on deporting Jews to Germany than other occupied countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. Deportations started in 1942 when the play takes place, and when the first trains went from France to Auschwitz. They were more enthusiastic than the Italians under Mussolini too. Jews lost their Civil Rights in 1938 in Italy. However, a Jewish Italian colleague was a child in the war and said that even in Florence, her family was relatively safe enough until September 1943 when the Germans took control. They then fled to the north-west, where the local village concealed their identity. A rough estimate suggests that 75,000 French Jews were murdered against 7,500 Italian Jews.
In 1995, President Chirac stated that it was time that France faced up to its past and he acknowledged the role that the state had played in the persecution of Jews and other victims of the German occupation. Those responsible for the roundup, according to Chirac, were “4,500 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders [who] obeyed the demands of the Nazis … Those black hours soiled our history forever. … The criminal madness of the occupier was assisted by the French people, by the French State. … France, that day, committed the irreparable”
President Macron: I say it again here. It was indeed France that organized the roundup, the deportation, and thus, for almost all, death. (2017)
However, Wikipedia points out that 75% of France’s 330,000 Jews did survive the war. The programme notes that Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s family hid Polish Jewish refugees during the war.
For the British audience there’s the uncomfortable What if …. The novelist Robert Harris also explored an alternative history of a conquered Nazi-occupied World War Two Britain in Fatherland. Books and TV series about the German occupation of the Channel Islands retain great popularity over seventy years. How would we have reacted? We like to think better. My politics tutor at Hull, Bob Benwick, was American. We were studying the rise of Fascism in Europe, and he said he had come to Hull, as one of the two places where Oswald Moseley’s brown-shirted British Fascists were driven off the streets by the local populace when they tried to march through … the other was East London. A fellow author was from a Hull Jewish family and confirmed that this was remembered with great pride.
Jeremy Sams’ translation flows seamlessly. Though there is one point, where Pierre is prying somewhat greasily about the technical details of the first attempt at intercourse (he wants to know if it worked “technically”) he says they’ll have rabbit for dinner, but that Joseph has had some (I don’t have the text). This sounded like an innuendo. Rabbits are known for being particularly fecund and in English we talk about someone ‘going at it like a rabbit.’ We are beyond my meagre French here, so I resorted to the internet. Apparently un chaud lapin is a man who likes sleeping around. I kept looking. connil is Medieval French for rabbit, akin to English dialect coney or cunny. I found online:
lapin is a recent invention. Sometimes during the Medieval period, poets were making bawdy jokes about the original name for rabbit which was connil (found as such in the adventures of the wily fox Renart) and was used in much the same way as one would use pussy nowadays (Dea Ardesca, Quora)
I have no way of knowing what it was in the French original play. Sometimes in both simplifying and translating you have to add. If they wanted to retain a crude and clumsy innuendo from Pierre (if it was ever there), you’d need something like ‘The butcher said it’s rabbit, but who knows, it could be cat. But Joseph’s already had pussy …’ or just ‘Is Joseph like a rabbit?’
Otto Abetz was a real person, as the programme notes point out. Abetz was responsible for appropriating Jewish property in Paris. The others are fictional. At the end we get a ‘What happened to them …’ which is normally a film technique before the credits. Karen found the blend of true (Abetz) and fictional mildly disconcerting. I was fine with it.
It’s a superb play, construction, momentum, staging and text. Given such first rate acting performances, it’s hard to see why anyone would go below a 5 star rating. You won’t get into the Ustinov, I fear, but reviewers are united in suggesting it will go on to London or touring in larger venues. The play’s too intimate for a large theatre, but it could certainly take somewhere larger than this small studio theatre, like the Donmar Warehouse or Menier Chocolate Factory, or larger, Chichester Minerva, or moving up in size again, Salisbury Playhouse.
There is a 2021 French film version available on Amazon Prime. We will watch it.
*****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
four star
Daily Mail ****
Dominic Maxwell, The Times ****
Mail on Sunday ****
Kris Hallett, What’s On Stage ****
Dave Fargnoli, The Stage ****
Cheryl Markosky, Broadway World ****
three star
David Jays, The Guardian ***
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
LINDSAY POSNER (DIRECTOR)
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, Bath TheatreRoyal 2018
The Lie by Florian Zeller, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2017
The Truth by Florian Zeller, Menier Chocolate Factory 2016
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory 2015
Dinner With Saddam by Anthony Horowitz, Menier Chocolate Factory 2015
The Hypochondriac by Moliere, adapted Richard Bean, Bath Theatre Royal, 2014
A Little Hotel On The Side By Feydau, Bath Theatre Royal 2013
She Stoops To Conquer by Goldsmith, Bath Theatre Royal 2014
Hay Fever by Noel Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2014
Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh, Poole Lighthouse 2013
LISA DILLON
Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2019
The Roaring Girl by Dekker & Middleton, RSC 2014 (Moll Cutpurse)
The Taming Of The Shrew, RSC 2012 (Kate)
Birthday by Joe Penhall
King John, Rose Kingston, 2016 (Lady Constance)
Love’s Labour’s Lost, RSC & Chichester 2016 (Rosaline)
Much Ado About Nothing (Love’s Labour’s Won) RSC & Chichester 2016 (Beatrice)
ALEXANDER HANSON
The Truth by Florian Zeller, Menier Chocolate Factory 2016
The Lie by Florian Zeller, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2017
Wars of The Roses: Richard III, Rose Kingston (Buckingham)
Wars of The Roses: Edward IV Rose Kingston (Richard, D. of York)
Wars of The Roses: Henry VI Rose Kingston (Richard, D. of York)
NIGEL LINDSAY
Woman in Mind by Alan Ayckbourn, Chichester 2022
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, Bath TheatreRoyal 2018
Richard II, RSC (Bolingbroke)
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