This is Fiddler as London has never seen it before: revamped, refreshed and al fresco. American director Jordan Fein places the stirring 1964 Broadway musical by Joseph Stein (book), Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) about life in a Jewish stetl circa 1905, on an abstract set, where a ski-jump field of wheat seems to have peeled up from the floor and everyone is prey to the elements.
His cast, led by Broadway regular Adam Dannheisser as Tevye the milkman and Lara Pulver as his wife Golde, use their own accents. Most of them have terrific singing voices and those that don’t exude character.
It’s a liberating, exuberant and humane production where the great songs – Tradition; If I Were a Rich Man; Sunrise, Sunset – touch you to the core. It also feels sadly contemporary without even trying.
Tevye’s waning, orthodox paternal influence over his five daughters is a sign of the social and political upheaval looming across the world. Three girls make their own choices: of a poor man, a radical, and a non-Jew. Great: but the family story takes place amid pogroms against Jewish communities in a territory under Tsarist Russian control that is today part of Ukraine.
You can’t help but find echoes of Putin’s aggression and the war in Gaza in the wider political frame. Or of recent racist riots across Britain in the “little, unofficial demonstration” that wrecks the wedding of Tevye’s eldest daughter Tzeitel. The day before this show’s opening night, videos circulated on social media showing a group of pro-Palestinian protestors apparently confronting audience members in a nearby Regent’s Park café.
But theatre can tell greater truths than snapshots on social or traditional media. Beliefs and territory are important here but it’s humans that really matter. Dannheisser’s Tevye is a warm, tender-hearted mule of a man, complaining about his lot to God while equivocating himself out of hardline positions. Pulver, the Sherlock star back in the UK after years in America, brings a wearied glamour and a commanding singing voice to Golde.
There’s a lovely, matching partnership between Liv Andrusier as Tzeitel and Dan Wolff as her suitor Motel, a man so diffident he almost melts into the floor. Hannah Bristow as Chava, the daughter who marries a gentile – a man who consorts with Cossack thugs – duets with and then supplants the titular fiddler as a symbol of precariousness.
Fein worked with Daniel Fish on the revelatory, erotically-charged Oklahoma! that came to London in 2022. Designer Tom Scutt built the visual world of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. Their collaboration here is less radical, though a dream sequence involving wind and smoke machines and a giant skeletal apparition comes close. Still, this is a hugely moving, sensitively revised Fiddler, cursed by relevance.
