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Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur'an, is a carefree little production that sweeps you up in a journey from 1960s Paris to the Whirling Dervishes of the Golden Crescent and looks at the unlikely friendship formed between a Sufi Muslim, Monsieur Ibrahim and a 13-year-old Jewish boy, Moses, and his realisation that: "Jews, Muslims and Christians had many great men in common before we started hitting each other over the head."
But while this production, based on the book by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, is endearing, it is hardly cutting edge and we learn a frustratingly small amount about the charismatic, worldly wise Monsieur Ibrahim played by Nadim Sawalha.
It is Ryan Sampson's Moses that takes centre stage as the eager youngster abandoned by his mother and now child slave to his frosty father, a miserable Jewish lawyer, who treats him "no better than a dog and he hated dogs," laments the teenager.
Indignant when he is wrongly suspected of stealing from the house keeping, Moses reacts by starting to play to type but in addition to fleecing his pa for real, he also begins shop-lifting from Monsieur Ibrahim's grocery store.
The relationship that blossoms is playful as well as paternal and M. Ibrahim advises Mo-Mo, as he fondly calls him, to "swap his father's liver pate with dog food", as a household economy, so that Moses can save up for his favourite prostitute on the Rue de Paradis, a passion that M. Ibrahim also shares and together they take a cross-Paris journey that opens up the teenager's eyes to the wonders of this great city.
But this is just the start of their gallivants, which include a trip to Normandy and then later when Moses' father commits suicide in Marseille and he is adopted by M. Ibrahim, the pair take a road trip back to M. Ibrahim's homeland where the old man dies just minutes outside his childhood village.
Throughout, M. Ibrahim doles out legions of wise aphorisms, but what made him such a man of infinite resource and sagacity? How did he arrive in Paris? What is his story? And what significance do the three dried flowers in his copy of the Qur’an have? Sadly, we never find out and M. Ibrahim, remains a grossly underdeveloped character and in this short play- 70 mins with no interval-there is more than enough scope to discover his life history and explore the well-thumbed pages of his Qur'an with him.
In addition to their main roles Sawalha and Sampson play all the other characters peppering the plot including Bridget Bardot, a French tart on the Rue de Paradis and Moses' long lost mother.
Theatre goers are a savvy bunch and a good night out demands that there is real meat on the bones of the characters. For a production to be heart warming and humorous is not enough, even if it does it with a pedagogic lesson that friendship can blossom regardless of age and beliefs and that parenthood extends beyond a blood connection. But although religious differences recede into the background of this piece, exploring M.Ibrahim's credo and biography, could have been a very worthwhile route for this production to have followed and the fact that it wasn't pursued, is a real missed opportunity.
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LONDON:
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