Tradition!

It is the law of theatre that every couple of years, someone remakes Fiddler on the Roof

The cast of Fidder on the Roof, led by Adam Dannheisser (wielding the vodka). Photo: Marc Brenner

And my God have they knocked it out of the shtetl this time.

What I’ve seen

I was gutted to miss Jordan Fein’s production of Fiddler on the Roof when it was at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre (it won a bunch of awards and everyone kept banging on about it). Fortunately someone had the sense to throw some cash into transferring it to the Barbican, where it’s now running to July 19.

It is an out and out delight (the fact that it’s a domestic drama playing out against the background of the encroaching pogroms notwithstanding).

Anchored by American actor Adam Dannheisser as the warmly grumpy Tevye, adoring of but exasperated by his errant daughters, who keep inconveniently falling in love with what we would now consider perfectly appropriate men (they’re supposed to wait patiently for the village matchmaker, Yente, to find them a husband), the production swirls with abandon around Tom Scutt’s rustic stage (literally – it’s a hayfield on three sides and above), which makes the moments of stillness even more satisfying.

If you don’t know the story, it’s 1905 in the tiny village of Anatevka in what is now Ukraine. Jewish milkman Tevye is hardworking, desperately poor, and he and his wife Golde expect Yente to come by any day now, with a match for their eldest daughter Tzeitel. But times are changing rapidly and of course, Tzeitel has other ideas.

As do, eventually, her sisters Hodel and Chava. This is a challenge for Tevye, who expects to be the be all and end all when it comes to decision-making (though you do get the feeling that he hasn’t noticed when this hasn’t happened before).

Where will it end, he asks himself, every time he finds himself bending to the will of another daughter, until, as he cries in desperation after Chava marries a Gentile boy in secret, “If I try and bend that far, I'll break!”

Too much change at once can be too much – though some will be forced upon you whether you like it or not, as the Jewish population of Anatevka will find to their desperate cost.

Fein’s cast navigate the moments of threat that foreshadow the inevitable pogroms perfectly. The tension as Tevye and his friends get exuberantly, rip-roaring drunk on brandy in the presence of a group of watchful, vodka swilling Russians is like watching a tightrope walk.

The cast is lovely – musical theatre royalty Lara Pulver (you might also have seen her recently in Mobland, where she plays Bella Harrigan, Kevin’s wife) is excellent as Golde, Tevye’s wife of 25 years. Their rendition together of the song Do You Love Me?, sung as they, who met for the first time on their wedding day, come to terms with the fact that their daughters are seeking love not security, is absolutely gorgeous.