"Fiddler on the Roof". Wycombe Swan
Topol died two years ago, having played Tevye the Dairyman over 3,500 times in 42 years of Fiddling on the Roof. That lame horse of his never did get better, but at least he became a rich, if not idle-didle, man. Topol cast a huge shadow over this role. He defined it. He vanquished London audiences in the late 1960s with his swaggering, staggering, Yiddish dance-stride and his mellifluous baritone, rich and fruity as persimmons from the plains of Sharon. At that stage he couldn’t even speak English, and learnt the entire script phonetically. The film producers gave him the part in 1971, whipping it from under the nose of an outraged Zero Mostel, and the rest was history. Of course Fiddler on the Roof goes back even earlier than Topol and the 60s. Its roots are in the tales of Sholom Aleichem and the Yiddish cinema of the 1930s – especially Maurice Schwartz’s 1939 classic Tevye , which in turn was a reworking of an even older Yiddish film from 1919, Khava . Khava was long thought to b...