This thrilling revival of Fiddler raises the roof
Theatre Fiddler on the Roof Playhouse Theatre
In the past, Fiddler on the Roof, the instant-classic Broadway blockbuster of 1964, has been staged in big-capacity venues here: Her Majesty’s, the Apollo Victoria, the Palladium, the Savoy – all seating over a thousand (in the Palladium’s case, more than 2,000). Now Trevor Nunn’s revival, crossing from the Menier Chocolate Factory following a sell-out run, has docked at the Playhouse, where the capacity has been deliberately shrunk to less than 700. The result is a thrilling, intimate experience – and the best Fiddler I’ve seen in the West End.
Nunn directed Les Mis. He knows how to make things look monumental if he so chooses. But he has a penchant for the up-close and personal. Witness his peerless Dench/mckellen RSC “studio” Macbeth and chamber Merchant of Venice at the NT.
At the Menier, he wanted us to feel as though as we had joined that toiling, kvetching, God-fearing patriarch Tevye the milkman (played by Andy Nyman) in the thronging heart of a Pale of Settlement shtetl. With mood-setting lanterns, fencing, water-pump and a cluster of dinky dwellings bearing triangular roofs and dreamlike shades of Chagall (design by Robert Jones), the approach might have been kitsch – an accusation sometimes levelled at the show. But it served a coherent and compelling
purpose and that vision survives intact in a restaging that sees the stalls raised, angled and bisected by a pathway, and raked seating applied to the circle tiers so the action is closer and restricted views are banished.
What is that purpose? Fundamentally, it’s to draw us in: then, come the climax, when the entire Jewish community of the fictional Anatevka is uprooted by a Russian pogrom (we’re circa 1905) – it makes us register the force of that emptyingout. We haven’t just been spectators, we’ve been near-neighbours – party to personal angst, domestic strife and communal euphoria, signalled in much flailing-limbed dancing.
Teyve’s mantra is “tradition” – faith and ritual sustains him. That continuum gets tested by the incursions of the outside world and the independent-mindedness of his daughters. The fall-out is benign inasmuch as young love usurps old-fashioned arranged marriage, but the rupture of enforced exile has the force of an earthquake for him and his kind; and it’s as if we feel the ground shift beneath us too. As the company (32-strong) head off, we’re reminded we’ve been watching ghosts – and a vanished way of life – through the artifice of theatrical invocation.
Although the material – derived from the stories of hallowed Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem – hails from a bygone era, the production – like The Jungle last year, with its comparable feat of transformation to spirit up the bulldozed Calais “jungle” camp – speaks to our age of mass upheaval; thoughts of resurgent anti-semitism and the perennial clashes between devout custom and liberalising modernity are pressed home too.
But the reason Joseph Stein (book), Jerry Bock (music) and the miraculously still-with-us Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) pulled off such a triumph is that they dealt with weighty themes with the lightest touch, dancing a fine line between handed-on-heritage and pastiche, between tragedy and comedy, between dusty old tales and the thrill of a Broadway show, most famously embodied in Jerome Robbins’s “bottledance” sequence, which he invented but became quasi-folkloric.
That number is done with audacity and elan. But then so is everything; the singing is strong, the musical sound terrific.
Nyman, who has grown into the role, delivers the goods again, incorporating yowls and growls of work-induced discomfort into If I Were a Rich Man, and overall applying a judicious mix of world-weary exasperation, affected unconcern and twinkling kindness to a part made famous by Zero Mostel and Chaim Topol. Does he match them? Maybe not. Does it matter? Not so much. The shtetl’s the thing, not the star.