Fiddler on the Roof, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London

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Tradition? Not so sure — in a very modernist telling, which re-focuses the musical on the women. We also got the sense of what it meant to be a small community under threat at any time — from their friends, neighbours, clients and customers.

The village was a concrete bunker with minimal furniture a la The Seagull at the Harold Pinter Theatre. A very brutalist Anatevka. It’s wave-like roof was covered in a field of corn through which the eponymous fiddler and other characters can wander — or leave through. The roof also adds to the sense of precariousness as it’s going to be set on fire in a Tsarist sanctioned community action at the end of the First Act.

The singing was wonderful — the dancing messier until the bottle dance started, which was wonderful. Partly it was all about weddings — who would be matched by the matchmaker. At the same time, although the community sang wholeheartedly about how much it believed in tradition, it was all about breaking traditions — although only to a point. Lara Pulver was a magnificently steely Golde, whilst Adam Dennhesier was a tender hearted patriarch as Tevye, soft-hearted and wanting the best for his daughters, most of the time. I loved too how the characters were always being themselves — such as Golde peeling and chopping vegetables, and Chava constantly clutching and in fear for her book.

Tzeitel (Liv Andrusier) was charming in her resistance, as the eldest daughter, to being married to wealthy and old Lazar Wolf (Michael S. Siegel) and wanting to be married to the impoverished tailor Motel (Daniel Wolff) — leading the community cherished new arrival of a…sewing machine! Hodel (Georgia Bruce) shocks the community with another new thing — dancing together with a man, and her love for the family’s tutor Perchik (Daniel Krikler). Inspired by his love of thinking, modernity, new ideas and wanting to make a better world… When he’s arrested and taken to Siberia, she chooses to follow him, seeking only her father’s blessing, and promising that they will follow the traditions, being married under a canopy. The family begins to scatter as modern times (love and persecution and pogroms) hit at them.

Chava (Hannah Bristow), the quiet scholar of the group, shocks everyone by befriending and falling in love with…a Russian, Fyedka (Gregor Milne). When tradition dictates that they never see each other again, she elopes, and is horribly, painfully cut off by her family — and her community. Yet in such a small place, you have to wonder how they managed to avoid each other. Whilst she appears to play her clarinet, as her father tearfully reminisces about his lost daughter, there isn’t the acknowledgement that the work suggests in other versions — here she’s definitely cast out until the very end, separate. She appears shouting ‘father’ and is blanked — her family will never see her.

Cleverly, by utilising the front part of the stage where the audience were sat, we got a sense of the sisters as sisters, how they were very much a unit. When the community formed a circle, we got a sense of their vulnerability, smallness, but loyalty and connectedness. Everyone was in everyone else’s business — such as the comical way that news/gossip spreads until it becomes mangled beyond recognition! I loved too how the clothing suggested different communities, different traditions — and how the Jewish community were a source of fascination to the local Russian community. They came to join in the dancing (welcome or not) and also pestered Chava (perhaps in boisterous fun, perhaps in threat which was stopped in time).

I couldn’t get over the friendly local Russian official who came (regretfully, almost embarrassed) to carry out the latest Tsarist edict — setting fire to the roof of corn, turning over wedding feast tables, invading a wedding and eventually forcing the community to leave and move on, abandoning their homes forever. I’m not sure what was weirder — the idea of pogrom itself — or the awkwardness of its implementation. Having seen the little community in a fierce huddle of a circle, we felt their lives uprooted, their traditions broken and scattered, the endless precariousness of life through the fiddle dancing on the roof, the peace of Shabbat gone.

Through the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, the music and singing was wonderful. I loved the parents moving centre stage to mournfully, wistfully, yearningly reflect on the (and their) passing years as their daughter and son-in-law married under a canopy. Wonderful too was Tevye’s spectacularly comic nightmare resurrecting dead relatives and deceased wives to convert Golde into the language of love, rather than tradition…

The acrid smell of smoke during the interval left a troubling sense of peril in the shtetl…Which all the joyous music and dancing couldn’t hide. How then does a community under threat live and thrive? Tradition… and new traditions breaking Tradition, like love (and waltzes and polkas)…L’chaim!

And it’s not everyday you get to spot MickeyJoTheatre and Aeron James in a stagey setting!!

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Cultures: Arts Reviews and Views by Susan Tailby

By Susan Tailby. Appreciator of arts and culture; things I've seen and enjoyed and you might too! Reviews all my own opinion....Theatre, Movies, Dance & Art!