Farewell Mr Haffmann review: Dinner date with the Nazi ambassador

So as Joseph hides in his basement while his fellow Parisian Jews are rounded up for the camps, the jeweller dutifully apologises to pictures of his wife and children who have escaped to Switzerland, places their photos in a drawer and accepts the request to help Pierre and Isabelle become parents.

This fictional story is set against a real life backdrop populated by historical figures. Prominent among these is Berlin’s Nazi ambassador to France Otto Abetz, an art lover who made it his business to “liberate” great paintings from Jewish ownership including masters owned by the renowned Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg.

However the melding of real life figures such as Abetz (Alexander Hanson) and his wife Suzanne (Josefina Gabrielle) with Daguerre’s fictional characters is not wholly successful.

When Abetz, a regular customer of what is now Pierre’s jewellery shop, is invited to dinner it takes a fair amount of disbelief to credit Joseph’s chutzpah in joining the dinner while pretending to be Pierre’s cousin.

As persistent as these doubts is the nagging feeling that as emotional charged as Pierre and Isabelle’s yearning for a baby is, Daguerre’s decision to set the story in occupied France was made in order to give his fictional plot much needed heft. A tweak to the setting and this could so easily have been a comedy of manners.

Still, like all encounters between Jews and Nazis the dinner scene is taut with tension and excellently played by this quality cast. They are so good in fact that for most of this play’s uninterrupted 90 minutes they suppress the sense of a dark history being conscripted to serve a relatively trite story. Though ultimately that sense never goes away.