One tends to associate the Bush with rude, raw realism. So it comes as a bit of a shock to find it playing host to this piece of cross-cultural Gallic whimsy from Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. If this and the late, unlamented Heroes are anything to go by, French theatre must be in deeper crisis than one thought.
Schmitt's 70-minute play, translated by Patricia Benecke and Patrick Driver, deals with the friendship between an aged Sufi shopkeeper, Monsieur Ibrahim, and a 13-year-old Parisian Jewish boy, Moses. Brought together when Moses steals from the old man's store, they form an improbable alliance. They visit the Parisian tourist spots together and, after the death of Moses' father, holiday in Normandy and finally motor through Ibrahim's native Anatolia before the old man mercifully expires.
Suppressing the irreverent thought that a 70-year-old man holidaying with a young boy would probably arouse police suspicions, one has to ask what the play is actually telling us. That Muslims and Jews have much in common and can form loving friendships?
But Schmitt never puts his thesis to the test. All he does is create an idealised, fairytale Paris without a whiff of anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim prejudice. Even in the 60s, when the play is apparently set, it is hard to believe Muslims and Jews so cosily coexisted.
It is no accident that Schmitt's play has enjoyed international success and even been turned into a movie with Omar Sharif. What it creates is a world for the export market. In Paris, Brigitte Bardot pops into a neighbourhood shop. In Normandy, Ibrahim and Moses stay in Cabourg's Grand Hotel. And when they get to Anatolia they encounter whirling dervishes. I began to wish Schmitt could devise some new cliches.
What flimsy charm the piece possesses derives, in Benecke's production, from the two performers. Ryan Sampson, though a somewhat mature adolescent, neatly captures Moses' loneliness and desperate need for a surrogate father. Nadim Sawalha also endows the old shopkeeper with a quiet grace and loyally essays several other roles: I'd only question his assumption that Parisian prostitutes walk around clutching Thatcher-like handbags. But it's a measure of the play's escapist fantasy that, although Ibrahim makes Moses a present of the Qur'an, the boy never seems to read it.
And, while the piece could be seen as a timely plea for mutual tolerance, it feels more dated than Lessing's 18th century Nathan The Wise. This is an idyll for the soft-brained rather than a genuine play for today.
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