Fiddler On The Roof - Review

Barbican Theatre, London

****

Book by Joseph Stein

Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick

Music by Jerry Bock

Directed by Jordan Fein

Raphael Papo

Jordan Fein’s revival of Fiddler On The Roof first seen at London’s Open Air Theatre last year, returns to the city’s Barbican Theatre before a nationwide tour to last the rest of the year. As Tevye and Golde, Adam Dannheiser and Lara Pulver remain in their leading roles with both having matured from 2024.

Dannheiser always commanded the essentials of a Tevye . A big, bearded, Bear Jew of a man devoted to both family and faith and convincing as he deploys both humour and perfectly pitched pathos in his wrestling with life’s challenges, Dannheiser’s performance is one of the evening’s delights.

Pulver has grown in the last 12 months. Her role is now fully formed and be it gossiping with Yente, nagging Tevye, or just being the all-caring matriarch to her family, hers is a great Golde. While Tevye gets most of the juicy singing numbers in the show, Pulver, who’s musical theatre credentials are impeccable, makes fine work of the duetting balladry gifted to her by Harnick and Bock. Natasha Jules Bernard steps up to the role of Tzeitel, with Georgia Bruce returning as Hodel and Hannah Bristow as the clarinet playing Chava continuing to give Tevye one of the toughest challenges that can face an orthodox Jew.

Fiddler On The Roof is a Broadway classic and this production’s details are a treat. Beverley Klein’s maturely considered Yente and Raphael Papo’s enchanting Fiddler are fabulous. Julia Cheng’s choreography excites, while Tom Scutt’s ingenious design has beautifully translated the shtetl of Anatevka from the elements of Regent’s Park to the conventions of traditional theatre.

This musical remains a story of hope interwoven with never-ending tragedy. The show is set in Tsarist Russia around the turn of the 20th century when state-sponsored antisemitism was the norm, and the dark clouds of the Holocaust that was to befall European Jewry hadn’t even begun to form. Playing out in 2025, as calls for the destruction of the Jewish state echo around the world, the United Nations spouts blood libels that are echoed by governments and the media and murderous Jew-hate is manifest from Washington DC to Colorado, it feels like little has changed. 

This is a beautiful production playing to a very ugly world.

Runs until 19th July, then on tour

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Equally Divided

Watford Palace Theatre, Watford

***

Written by Ronald Harwood

Directed by Brigid Lamour

This review was first published in The Public Reviews


Beverley Klein (l) & Katharine Rogers


Equally Divided returns to the Watford stage, some 15 years after Ronald Harwood’s work first opened. It’s a curious literary concoction, part comic, part tragic and in part questioning important social and moral dilemmas that include loneliness, envy, rejection and the experience of second generation immigrants. The scope of Harwood’s writing is however so vast, that rather than studying any one of these difficult areas in depth, the author addresses far too many questions with a scatter-gun approach that too often resorts to shallow caricature. And so for a writer of such wisdom and talent, the play is ultimately a disappointing journey.


Notwithstanding, the cast of four are all engaging and as Edith Taylor, the protagonist, Beverley Klein delivers a virtuoso performance. Her character is the elder of two sisters, in her fifties, whose own sense of purpose in life has been drained from her by a manipulative mother recently deceased. We learn how in her final years, Edith provided round-the-clock personal care to her mother, whilst her sister Renata (played by Katharine Rogers) barely visited. Rogers too gives a noble performance. Her character has been married twice and wealthily, and is a woman who is sexually and financially fulfilled, albeit in therapy. Harwood however could not have made Renata more of a cliché, particularly when contrasted with the empty and drab sexless vessel that is Edith’s life. Albert Camus’ Cross Purpose, recently at the Kings Head in London, drew a similar picture of dourness far more succinctly.  To this production’s credit however, Klein – who is rarely off stage and with a script that gives her almost as much monologue and soliloquy as it does dialogue – rises to the challenge. The talented actress coaxes subtle (and sometimes blatant) nuance and pathos from almost every word, with a performance that is possibly reason enough alone to see the show.


The two men in the play are local solicitor Charles and antiques dealer Fabian. Walter van Dyk as the widowed lawyer plays a hapless twit of a provincial professional, besotted with Renata and blind to the initially desperate desire that Edith has for him and makes the best of a poorly developed cardboard cut-out of a character. Gregory Gudgeon as the lovable rogue antiquarian is sketched out by Harwood with such ambivalence , that one is ultimately not sure if he cares for Edith, or is ripping her off. This may well be the writer’s clumsy intention, but towards the end of the play, one is possibly beyond caring.


The text has several poetic references that Brigid Lamour has highlighted in the programme. The literary connotations are clear, but one cannot help but feel that if Edith had been given to recite Larkin’s famous This Be The Verse, we could all have been heading for the bar an hour earlier. Harwood writes of dispersal and of the desire of the immigrant to fit in. At times his analysis has pinpoint precision and is a true baring of his soul and of his experience. But whilst he clearly understands displacement and transience, this piece of theatre fails to move.


Runs to February 23rd