UK Edition
Review
Fiddler on the Roof, Playhouse Theatre, review: a thrilling version of the blockbuster musical
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 case of the Palladium, more than 2000).
Now Trevor Nunn’s revival, crossing the Thames 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 experience – immersive and intimate 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 casually levelled at the show. But it served a coherent and compelling artistic purpose and that vision survives intact in this restaging which sees the stalls raised, angled and bisected by a pathway, and raked seating applied to the circle tiers so that the action is closer and restricted views are banished.
What is that purpose? Fundamentally, it’s to draw us in, and then, come the climax, when the entire Jewish community of the fictional Anatevka is uprooted by a Russian pogrom (we’re circa 1905) – make us register the force of that emptying-out. 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 – reachable only 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 here last year, which pulled off a comparable feat of transformation to spirit up the bulldozed Calais ‘jungle’ camp - speaks to our age of mass upheaval; thoughts about 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-factor of a Broadway show, most famously embodied in Jerome Robbins’ ‘bottle-dance’ sequence, bottles balanced atop the hats of male wedding-guests, which he invented but has become quasi-folkloric.
That number is done with audacity and elan. But then so is everything; the singing is strong, the musical sound (with orchestra of eight) 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.
Booking to June 15. Tickets: 0844 871 7631; www.fiddlerwestend.com