Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s two-hander may be set in 1960s Paris, but its subject leaps the decades, cities and nations. Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur’an is about the bond that grows between a young French Jew and an elderly French Arab, and the boy’s realisation that “Jews, Muslims and even Christians had plenty of great men in common before they started hitting each other over the head”.
It’s well-intentioned, touching, humorous but also pretty soft-centred. We learn far too little about Monsieur Ibrahim (Nadim Sawalha), who runs a shop in a mainly Jewish street. Why is he there? Where has he come from? What’s his story? Didn’t a bit too much wishfulness go into the creation of a character who exudes paternal good-nature, kindness, insight, wisdom and tolerance, and, if he has anything inside him but sweetness and light, keeps it smilingly hidden?
We learn much more about Ryan Sampson’s Moses, who was rejected by his mother at birth and must live with his father, a lawyer who uses the boy as a servant and makes his cold contempt for him abundantly clear. At first Moses steals from Ibrahim’s shop “because he’s only an Arab”. But soon the all-seeing old man is not only tolerating the thefts but encouraging Moses to feed his father dog-food as a pâté substitute, so that he, Moses, can save enough money to visit his favourite prostitute.
Where the Koran and its “flowers” come into this is unclear. All we learn is that it is “spiritual”, like the sufi dancers Moses and Ibrahim join when they go to the Middle East after Moses’s father has deserted him and come to a sad, bad end in Marseilles. Though I liked Schmitt’s own generosity — the forgiving Ibrahim justifies the lawyer’s aloofness by suggesting that he suffers from Holocaust-induced guilt — I didn’t feel he went a lot deeper than the average shrimping net.
Still, the play airs the question Brecht raised in his Caucasian Chalk Circle. What makes a true parent: mere biology or love and care? And not only do Sampson and the versatile Sawalha bring almost too much warmth to the debate: they play the odd other role, from Moses’s father to loitering Parisian tarts to Brigitte Bardot, who drops into Ibrahim’s shop for some water. In all, a charming treatment of a theme that needed something more.
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