Fiddler On the Roof

There’s an irony that ‘Fiddler On the Roof’ is being revived in the only theatre in London that doesn’t have one. But Jordan Fein’s joyous, then suddenly very sad production is all about uprooting traditions. So for the opening image – one of the most famous in musical theatre – where the fiddler would normally fiddle on a shtetl rooftop, here instead in Tom Scutt’s superb design he stands among wheat sheafs on a strip of land uprooted and peeled back like skin to hang threateningly above the stage.

It’s a remarkable image in a production full of them; a production about reinventing a classic musical through small gestures and symbols, rather than radical high concepts. Famously, ‘Fiddler’ was criticised when it premiered in 1964 as ‘shtetl kitsch’. We’ve got Tevye, the old wisecracker, and the increasingly untraditional marriages of his daughters; we’ve got the small Jewish community with the matchmaker and the slightly hapless Rabbi.

But Fein, who co-directed ‘sexy Oklahoma!’ when it came to London last year and helped strip it of any hokey old associations, eradicates the kitsch here, too. Yes it’s funny – Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye still cracks jokes and talks to the audience, though he’s more dad-funny than the kind of showman-comedian that Tevye often becomes – and yes it’s faithful, but this is a serious production.

Part of that is circumstance. There’s something particularly charged right now about a piece of theatre set on Russian land about a Jewish community. Even more so about a community being forced out by racist rioters. But partly Fein finds it in the material. When daughter Chava, a brilliantly defiant Hannah Bristow, marries outside the faith it’s too much for Tevye. ‘If I bend that much I’ll break’, he laments. He disowns her, and there’s a heartbreaking instrumental duet between the fiddler (an incredible Raphael Papo) who’s been haunting Tevye on stage the whole time, and Bristow, who comes on with a clarinet in hand, serenading her own demise.

It’s also one that finds joy where it can, mostly in the idea of community. Individually, there are some wonderful performances – Lara Pulver’s Golde is a joy, staunch enough to make Tevye’s jokes about his wife not seem too horrendously dated – but there’s some underpowered acting and some imperfect voices, too. It’s only when everyone comes together and sings as an ensemble that they blow the (non-existent) roof off.

In fact, one of the most extraordinary things about this show is the way it embraces that lack of roof, using the sun almost like a design element. It’s all gorgeous evening sunshine for the earlier, happier parts of the story, but the haunting wedding tune ‘Sunrise, Sunset’ is designed to kick in just as the light fades, and then the bleaker second half takes place under black skies. It’s such a clever bit of staging, embracing the inevitability of evening, of darkness.

And in a simple, stunning image at the end of the show, it’s not the fiddler who stands on the wheat field roof; it’s Chava, clarinet in hand, defiant as ever. Tradition!, the cast chant in that proud opening number. In Fein’s thoughtful, hopeful take on the old classic, traditions change.