This musical masterpiece is fiddly in more ways than one. Written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein, 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof is a brilliant but disarmingly complicated work, for which every production must find a balance between the lighter stuff – shtetl nostalgia and the weapons-grade quipping of its milkman protagonist Teyve – and the fact that it’s a story about the end of rural Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, that clearly foreshadows the Holocaust.
Recent British productions have tended to play up the grit of the story, which is based on the Yiddish short stories of bona fide shtetl dweller Sholem Aleichem. However, that can have its own pitfalls when the writing is undoubtedly more funny than sad. But director Jordan Fein’s superb take – a transfer from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – manages to find its own, brilliantly idiosyncratic balance. The tone here is, for the most part, drolly surreal, a dark clown show underpinning everything from the gags to the choreography (by Julia Cheng) to Fein’s penchant for a weird tableau. Jewish life in the village of Anatevka has a constant absurdity to it as Adam Dannheisser’s Teyve must attempt to placate his five daughters and their extremely modern ideas about love while also sucking up to the local Russian constable in the hope the pogroms will be gentler.
Key to all this working is US actor Dannheisser as Teyve. Avoiding the obvious temptation to tackle the role as if he’s delivering a stand up set, Dannheisser instead beautifully underplays it. Yes, his Teyve still wryly quips away to God any moment he’s alone and indulges in a little fourth-wall breaking. But even at his most excitable – be that dreaming of a wealthier future on ‘If I was a Rich Man’, reacting in dismay at his daughters’ romantic entanglements, or throwing himself into the eventual awkward wedding – he has a sort of bearish dignity and put-upon stoicism. For once he’s the straight man, plodding doggedly, endearingly forward through a world getting slowly madder. He tries to act the role of stern patriarch that tradition obliges. But tradition only goes so far in a world being steadily eroded by tides of change that go far beyond ‘mere’ antisemitism.
The air of dark absurdity is aided by a wonderfully evocative set from Tom Scutt – a nocturnal wheat field with a huge sward sliced out and raised above the stage to form the titular roof, while the band sit at the back, only partially obscured by the crops. I missed the show at the OAT last summer, but here Scutt’s set has an alluringly Beckettian claustrophobia to it that I can imagine might have been less of a factor under the stars.
Adding to the sense of the modernity are the accents – everyone speaks in their own voices rather than affected Yiddish, scraping away any sense of period drama cosiness.
Perennial topicality aside, a large part of the reason why Fiddler remains widely produced is that – like a Shakespeare play – it contains humour and darkness in outsized, somewhat incompatible measures, meaning a director has to make real choices, has to interpret it. And what an interpretation this is from Fein and co. It’s Fiddler with all the stuff you love about Fiddler – Cossack dancing, classic songs, immortal quips – but recast as an absurdist comedy with a beating human heart in Dannheiser. It’s unlikely to be a definitive take, but it is a brilliant one.
