Fiddler on the Roof review: Trevor Nunn’s interpretation is thoughtful, warm and intimate

1/8
Henry Hitchings6 December 2018

With its story of generational conflict and the battle between tradition and change, this crowd-pleasing musical, based on a group of stories by Sholem Aleichem, has become one of theatre’s hardy perennials — often professionally revived on both sides of the Atlantic, endlessly staged in American high schools, and even startlingly popular in Japan.

Combining an ebullient score by Jerry Bock and sentimental lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, it’s sometimes knocked for being kitsch. But in Trevor Nunn’s polished revival, which boasts a cast of nearly thirty and an excellent eight-piece band, it’s at once a feast of dance, a bouncy comedy and a defiant portrait of Jewish resilience.

Andy Nyman plays Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman living in the fictitious Ukrainian village of Anatevka with his stoical wife Golde (Judy Kuhn) and their five daughters. It’s 1905, and the threat of anti-Semitic violence hangs in the air. But Tevye has more immediate worries, as his daughters seem intent on marrying men he doesn’t favour — an unsettling sign for him of how customs are giving way to modern ideas of progress.

Proud, put-upon and addicted to misquoting the scriptures, Tevye is a romantic. Nyman’s performance is contagiously amusing, yet it also has soul and an earthy sense of precariousness. One song contains the lyric “Life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us”. Although at first the bruises don’t look that dark, we come to see that Tevye’s family is at risk of being displaced as a result of the Tsar’s brusque directives.

Nyman is the show’s anchor, but there’s vivid work all around him — from Dermot Canavan as amorous butcher Lazar Wolf, Joshua Gannon as timid tailor Motel and Stewart Clarke as Perchik, an educated outsider whose radicalism unsettles Anatevka’s norms. All the while Darius Luke Thompson as the titular fiddler stalks the periphery, a symbol of the world’s fragile balance.

This is a show famous for its set-pieces. The choreography is by Jerome Robbins and Matt Cole, and the highlight is a sequence in which four villagers spectacularly advance across the stage with bottles poised atop their heads. Nunn’s interpretation revels in this heightened physicality, but it’s also thoughtful, warm and intimate.

Until March 9 (020 7378 1713, menierchocolatefactory.com)

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