Fiddler on the Roof – Playhouse Theatre

Stewart Clarke and Harriet Bunton in Fiddler on the Roof at the Playhouse Theatre, London. Picture: Johan Persson

Fiddler on the Roof continues at the Playhouse Theatre, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The first thing one notices on arrival at this transfer of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of Fiddler on the Roof is the set. One can hardly miss it: the small houses and gabled rooftops bleed out from the Playhouse’s stage into the auditorium, blurring the demarcation between actors and audience.

The effect is highly atmospheric, adding to the sense that this tiny pocket of London has become the Russian shtetl of Anatevka.

Set in 1905, Joseph Stein’s book, Jerry Bock’s music and Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics take the tales of Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem and craft the story a village whose traditional values come under threat from both the personal and political.

For the local dairyman Tevye, his greatest traditional role is finding husbands for his five daughters. But one by one, they begin to reject the notion of marriage being a financial transaction organised by parents, instead choosing the modern notion of marrying for love.

As Tevye, Andy Nyman initially cuts a rather unassuming figure: an amiable pseudo-narrator, a way in for us to appreciate the other, larger characters of the village. His shuffling amiability nestles nicely with Judy Kuhn’s more serious Golde – while it is clear that the wife is the rock of the family, patriarchal tradition affords the responsibility of family decision-making on the shoulders of the family member least suited.

And while Nyman doesn’t have the strongest singing voice of the actors to have assumed the role of Tevye in the past, his characterisation fits the character well. Under Trevor Nunn’s direction, the classic ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ simultaneously expresses the family’s lack of funds, the dairyman’s piety, and the increasing toll that middle age is placing upon his body.

Of the family’s five daughters, Harriet Bunton impresses most as Hodel, who defies her father to marry revolutionary teacher Perchik (Stewart Clarke), backed up by Molly Osborne’s Tzeitel and Nicola Brown’s Chava. It is the latter’s choice of suitor, Matthew Hawksley’s gentile Fyedka, that allows Nyman to display a deeper side to his Tevye. The act of a father denying the existence of the daughter who betrayed him as a heart-breaking moment.

The precarious nature of life in a Jewish enclave in Tsarist Russia – as insecure as a fiddler playing on one of Anatevka’s sloping roofs — is the other form of disruption to Tevye’s sense of faith and tradition. If the violent disruption to the wedding at the end of Act I is a little lacking on dramatic tension, the forced expulsion of the Jewish residents of Anatevka brings a huge dramatic climax to Act II.

Nunn’s production does its best to rid Fiddler on the Roof of the saccharine, sanitised portrayal which Philip Roth once described as “Shtetl kitsch”. There is also a sense that the story of Jewish oppression, and of communities displaced en masse, evokes very contemporary concerns. This, then, is the Fiddler for our times.

Scott Matthewman

Tickets for Fiddler on the Roof are available HERE.