Review: Fiddler on the Roof at The Palace Theatre, Manchester

“…brought the audience to its feet in thunderous appreciation of an absolutely spellbinding show…”

Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein, The Palace Theatre, Manchester

By Nicholas Graham

How to improve on perfection?  Fiddler On The Roof arrives in Manchester from London’s West End trailing a stream of Olivier Awards, rave reviews, and sold-out runs at The Barbican and Regent’s Park Theatre.  If you think this sets the bar high, then prepare to be astonished – because the sheer brilliance of every aspect of this show exceeds all expectations.

Adapted from Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s stories of ‘Tevye The Dairyman’, Fiddler portrays the last days of Jewish peasant life in the fictional shtetl of Anatevka in 1890s Ukraine, a divided society on the verge of violent upheaval.  Tevye is faced not just with the problem of how a poor man can find suitable husbands for five daughters, but how to do so while his community is being destroyed.  Traditions are changing – generations-old matchmaking is giving way to the outrageous innovation of daughters choosing husbands for themselves – and revolution is brewing.  

Matthew Woodyatt’s Tevye is a titanic presence, alternately wry and tormented, dominating both the stage and the soundscape.  From the moment he begins the emblematic If I Were A Rich Man, he’s utterly authentic and enthralling.  And he’s accompanied wherever he goes by the Fiddler (on opening night, the Royal Northern College of Music’s very own Roman Lytwyniw) whose virtuoso playing keeps up a commentary on the action that’s by turns sardonic, satirical, gentle and yearning. 

It’s genuinely difficult to pick out individual peaks from an incredibly strong ensemble, but the sheer vocal power of Natasha Jules Bernard’s Tzeitel, especially when she conjures up the ghost of her grandmother, is spine-tingling, Beverley Klein’s Yente-the-matchmaker is a fiery bundle of wise-cracking wisdom, and the harmonies of Sunrise, Sunset are ethereally intense.   

And I need to talk about the bottle dance at the wedding of Tzeitel and Motel.  Four men dance together, bottles balanced precariously on top of their hats.  At a bare minimum, this requires outstanding faith in the dancers’ own athleticism, expressed as absolute precision of movement and synchronization.  And it needs a bravura exuberance that pushes the bounds of balance upon the brink of looming disaster without ever conceding that those bottles can fall.  It’s not just the highlight of a show of highlights, it wraps up humour, skill, optimism and uncertainty into five minutes of sheer delight, communicating something profound about the culture it memorialises.  Choreographer Julia Cheng draws something very special indeed out of her dancers in this number as, step by step, they keep imminent disaster at bay.  This passage of transcendent joy is followed by the violent arrival of state-sponsored thuggery and the clear message that this world is about to tip over into chaos and be lost forever.

Tom Scutt’s stage design and Aideen Malone’s lighting set the action in an Anatevka of wheatfields bathed in the elegiacally serene light of a long-drawn-out evening that you come to realise must surely end.  The fiddler’s ‘roof’, which encloses the performance space rises and falls, cleverly modulating the acoustics between domestic intimacy and public drama.  These changes serve to reinforce the precariousness of Tevye’s existence: Jewish celebrations are joined – and interrupted – by thuggish Tsarist dancers, the wedding disrupted by violence all the more sinister for being half-apologetic.  When the end does come to Anatevka’s Jewish community, with enforced emigration, it is sudden, silent and shockingly dark.  That ending brought the audience to its feet in thunderous appreciation of an absolutely spellbinding show.  I urge you to see it.

Fiddler on the Roof plays at The Palace Theatre, Manchester until Saturday 01 November. Tickets are available here.

Nicholas Graham is the author of historical detective fiction ‘The Judas Case’, and is currently working on its sequel ‘Solomon’s Vineyard’.  He was a member of the Sidney Sussex College Cambridge team that won BBC-2’s ‘University Challenge – Champion of Champions’ series, and is a graduate of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Writing School.  He lives in Cumbria. Read more of his work here or find him on Twitter/X.