"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 be lost, but after almost a century a descendant of one of the actors donated an original copy to a film library in the USA.

So this story is imprinted through a hundred years of Jewish life, and it captures so much of that century: persecution, emigration, assimilation, aliyah. It’s all there. The contemporary relevance is discombobulating and unnerving: Anatevka is a Ukrainian village under attack from Russian forces. Innocent Jewish women and children are being ordered to move out of their homes like Gazan civilians. Tevye’s family head off hopefully to the USA – good luck with that in 2025. The antisemitism on our streets may not have reached pogrom level yet, but every bag coming into the Wycombe Swan Theatre is searched before this show. Just being a Jewish musical is enough to make it a risk in today’s Divided Kingdom.

Superficially, Fiddler on the Roof is about the clash of tradition and change. But its real theme is Khava: the story of a girl who married out. In Orthodox Jewish tradition, a child who marries a gentile is dead to the parents. They never see, talk or hear about that child again. Nazis visited that torture on Jews many thousands of times. You can see it on stolen moments of furtive camerawork from Drancy in 1942, heartlessly subtitled Trennung der Eltern vom Kind – separation of parent from child. But to impose that torture on yourselves? That is one of the greatest Jewish tragedies of all, and it’s entirely self-inflicted. It lies not only at the heart of Fiddler on the Roof, but at the heart of the Orthodox Jewish community. Earlier this year it was the emotional core of Nathan Englander’s play What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and here it is once more. Why do Jewish writers, again and again, speak out against this self-destructive practice? Is it possible, just possible, that in this case, the rabbis might have got it wrong? No! There is no other hand.

So you might say there’s a lot of historical, emotional and psychological baggage going into a performance of Fiddler on the Roof.

Jordan Fein’s production was the runaway hit of 2024, selling out the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, and recreating itself (according to reviews) with even greater intensity in the Barbican. Now it’s out on a national tour with a mostly new cast. And even in its slimmed-down, carry-on format it’s still a joy. Matthew Woodyatt as Tevye brings heart, humour and even a bit of extra Ashkenazi ichle to If I Were a Rich Man. Jodie Jacobs is every inch the matriarch as Golde. Between them they make the usually forgettable Do You Love Me? one of the most heartwarming moments of the evening. And the three older daughters, Tzeitel (Natasha Jules Bernard), Hodel (Georgia Bruce), and Chava (Hannah Bristow) are punchier than in any production I’ve ever seen. Rather than demure worms who dare to turn, these women are ready to fight for their own futures from the start. Tzeitel actually participates in the magnificent Fake Dream sequence, playing both her own grandmother and the terrifying Frumme Sarah, with distended arms straight out of a Tim Burton movie and a voice that shivers the rafters.

It’s in moments of innovation like this that the production really shines. The set, a delicate wheat canopy bounded by corded sheaves at the wings, emphasises the fragility of the villagers’ existence, always on the verge of being cut down, while also doubling as a chuppah, evoking both marriage and transience. The fiddler himself (Roman Lytwyniw), always intended as a parallel to Tevye’s narrator-cum-patrician, becomes here something more akin to a Philip-Pullmanesque daemon. He is effectively Tevye’s conscience, and his haunting strings speak of the family’s fears, hopes and daily grind. Perhaps most evocative of all, during Chava’s farewell song, Hannah Bristow produces a clarinet and duets hauntingly with the Fiddler, as if she is taking her destiny into her own hands, determined to play her own tune. Together, their sound beckons towards a mournful klezmer, celebrating the weddings that will never come. It’s fitting that her music is the final sound of the show.

Given how minimalist this staging is, it’s packed with action. Julia Cheng’s choreography captures both Jewish and Russian traditions, with leaping, spinning, hora-ing, and a jaw-dropping performance of the famous rabbinic bottle dance. There is something about the sight of five Jewish men advancing towards you on their knees with bottles balanced on their streimels that is both thrilling and supremely absurd. Once again, as with the Fiddler himself, the visual emphasis is on trying to keep one’s balance and the threat of imminent destruction.

The production is also brazenly laissez-faire about accents – and I think I approve. Woodyatt’s Tevye comes from the Welsh valleys, Golde from North London, Lazar Wolf the Butcher from the Bronx, and Yente the Matchmaker is straight out of Stamford Hill. It makes Anatevka feel like a place whose population is ready to set out into the world. Soon they’ll be strangers in a strange new land, and the mix of accents universalises that immigrant experience.

When I first saw the film, as an eight-year-old, the UK was mired in its winter of discontent, and there was a power-cut five minutes before the end of the movie. I never heard Tevye say to Chava, ‘God go with you’ – his one moment of forgiveness to his wayward daughter. Instead there was only darkness. How fitting, and cathartic, that this production should also end in darkness, as Golde and Tevye head, with trepidation and determination, into the horrors of the Twentieth Century. It’s a solemn, respectful, elegiac end to an emotional evening, at least half of which I spent in tears, clasping my wife's arm. As the Good Book says, ‘When a fool cries in the theatre, he has overpaid for rear stalls.’