'Fiddler on the Roof' at The Playhouse Theatre

The new production of 'Fiddler on the Roof' was a sell out at the Menier Chocolate Factory and has now transferred to the Playhouse Theatre where we saw it last week. The theatre has been transformed into the village of Anatevka in the Ukraine with the seating re-arranged into a pathway winding through the stalls and the stage spilling out into the seating. It made for an interesting experience. I saw 'Fiddler' on Broadway in 2005 with Harvey Fierstein and Rosie O'Donnell in the lead roles so I've seen it before but don't have terribly good memories of it so I was interested to see what this production would be like.

It's the tale of Tevye and Golde and their five daughters during a period of change in Russia in the early 1900s and the Jewish pogroms. We meet the family and other villagers, like the matchmaker whose role is to find husbands and wives for the people of the village, the village butcher, the tailor and others. Tevye is keen to uphold the traditions he grew up with and regularly talks to God but his beliefs are challenged in a period of rapid change.

The match-maker finds a husband for his eldest daughter, Tzeitel, in the shape of the much older butcher Lazar Wolf but Tzeitel loves Motel the tailor. Tevye loves his daughter is won over to agreeing that his daughter can marry the tailor. His second daughter falls in love with a travelling bolshevik tutor and promises to marry him when he settles in Kiev and, once again Tevye relents and agrees to the match. His third daughter falls in love with a the son of a villager, a bookish gentile, and that is too much for him since his daughter cannot marry outside the faith and he disowns her, pushed too far.

There are moments of joy and sorrow as the tale progresses, and we see the marriage of the eldest daughter and the tailor gets his first sewing machine, we see his second daughter leave home to head to Siberia to join her beloved who has been arrested and imprisoned as a radical, and we see Golde turning away the matchmaker from making a match for the two youngest daughters. And then the local police issue the edict that all Jews must leave the village within three days and the villagers say their farewells and disperse, with Tevye and Golde heading to America while the eldest daughter and the tailor will save up money to join them at some point. The fate of the middle daughter is unknown since she's working in Siberia with her husband. There's a touching moment when the third daughter says farewell to her family and is ignored by her father. Her husband says that they too will leave the village since he does't want to live with such small minded people and, as they leave, her father quietly says 'God bless'. And the villagers all leave, carrying their worldly possessions to disperse to the four winds.

There are some touching moments in this production, directed by Trevor Nunn, and they seem to be the highlights of the show. I was surprised at how many of the songs I knew from Saturday evening variety shows in the late '60s and early '70s: 'Tradition', 'Matchmaker', 'If I Were A Rich Man', 'Sunrise, Sunset' and others. It's a very energetic show with lots of vigorous dancing and movement and that helps to highlight the quieter moments in the play.

The politics of the play are very current, with the Jewish community cowed and careful around their gentile neighbours who have all the power, Hodel prepared to travel by herself to the wastes of Siberia to marry her lover and, at the end, the entire community becoming migrants through no choice of their own, forced to seek new lives wherever they can. These are all essential parts of the play and not highlighted in any way but the parallels are there with what's happening in the world at the moment.

I wasn't sure what to expect but I liked this production, full of life and joy and sorrow, lots of laughs with big singing and dancing, telling the age-old stories of a family and a community. I liked the pairing of Andy Nyman as Tevye and Judy Kuhn as Golde who worked well together. I also liked Harriet Bunton as Hodel, the second sister, who brought her very touching sorrow and hope to the scene when she leaves for Siberia, and Dermot Canavan as old curmudgeon Lazar Wolf who makes peace with Tevye at the end. Louise Gold was also fun as the matchmaker who own't let you get a word in edgeways and decides to go to the Holy Land when they're forced to leave the village. I also liked the design of the production, the staging and lighting which were very effective.

Y'know, part of me wants to know what happened next. Did Hodel ever come back from Siberia with a tribe of children around her? How did Tevye survive the constant change of living in America and did he still talk to God? What happened to the matchmaker as she travelled across Russia and Europe and did she make it to the Holy Land. Or maybe not since we know that a world war awaited them, with a revolution and the dangers that brought, and then another world war and death camps. It probably wouldn't be a happy ending for most of the characters.

If you want a good night out you could do a lot worse than visit Anatevka for a few hours and have your spirits raised by watching life unfolding in front of you.