United Kingdom Joseph Stein and Jerry Bock, Fiddler on the Roof: Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 9.9.2025. (SRT)
Raphael Papo (The Fiddler) and Matthew Woodyatt (Tevye) © Johan Persson
Before it moved to its sell-out run in London’s Barbican, Jordan Fein’s production of Fiddler on the Roof opened at the Regent’s Park’s Open Air Theatre. Now as it plays indoors in Edinburgh, you still get a sense of that outdoors through Tom Scutt’s designs, which surround the action with fields of wheat from which the ensemble emerges as a unit at the start of Act I. The wheat also covers a ceiling which rises and falls at different parts of the action, serving as the canopy for the first act wedding scene, as well as acting as a stage for characters who interact with the community, like the enigmatic eponymous ‘Fiddler’ or, later, the daughter who has been cast out for marrying a Russian.
All of this grounds the community of Anatevka firmly in its land, making them one with the environment and making their final exile all the more poignant. It also grants an earthiness to the action, as characters’ entrances and exits weave in and out of the stalks, and the small orchestra plays at the back of the stage amidst the wheat field. It is a lovely setting for Joseph Stein and Jerry Bock’s musical to play out, with its themes of changing traditions and its meditation on the place of minorities in the world, a theme that sadly is as poignant as ever today.
Yet something felt missing, something slightly lacking. The performances were capable, and often much more than that, yet I sensed myself being kept at a distance as much as I was drawn in. With a musical set so clearly in a specific time and place (the Ukrainian shtetl in 1905) a decision needs to be taken about how far the actors inhabit their characters and, when it comes to accents, how far do they do a Yiddish impression? The correct answer, surely, is that either everybody does it or nobody does it, but this company chose an awkward halfway house where some did and some didn’t. That sounds like it should be a small thing but, in reality, the switch of accents between characters drew me out of the action and into the artificiality of the situation. Several of the characters, most often the minor ones, did passable Yiddish accents that could pass off as a certain fantasy shtetl chic, but some didn’t even try, like Golde, the daughters, or the constable. It didn’t help that Matthew Woodyatt’s Tevye was obviously Welsh, nor that Gregor Milne’s Scottish accent kept trying to burst through his Russian one as Fyedka. It also took a while for the tech team to find the right sound balance, making the first ten minutes or so a bit of a boom and, therefore, a strain on the ear.
Yet when this musical gets into its stride there isn’t much that can beat it. Sunrise, Sunset had me welling up, its meditation on the passing of time moving me far more than the final eviction. Regardless of what accent they were singing in; Woodyatt and Jodie Jacobs tugged the heart in Do You Love Me? and Woodyatt acted Tevye with swagger and chutzpah that reinforced his status as an everyman. The crowd scenes were a riot, particularly they wedding scene, where it was impossible to avoid tapping your foot, and the love scenes for each of Tevye’s daughters carried their own variety of poignancy. The small orchestra could tub-thump their way through a party scene or wring from the gentlest conversation every drop of emotion, while Raphael Papo played his eponymous fiddle with bags of character and plenty of klezmer slur.
This doesn’t quite efface my memories of Craig Revel Horwood’s 2013 production (review here) with Paul Michael Glaser, which was my first encounter with Fiddler and, therefore, burned into my memory. However, it is still a show that can move like no other, even if the accents are problematic.
At Edinburgh Festival Theatre until 13 September.
Simon Thompson
Cast:
Tevye – Matthew Woodyatt
Golde – Jodie Jacobs
Tzeitel – Natasha Jules Bernard
Hodel – Liz Singleton
Chava – Hanna Bristow
Yente – Beverley Klein
Motel – Dan Wolff
Perchik – Greg Bernstein
Lazar – Michael S. Siegel
The Fiddler – Raphael Papo
Production:
Director – Jordan Fein
Choreographer – Julia Cheng
Designer – Tom Scutt
Lighting designer – Aideen Malone
Musical supervision and Additional orchestrations – Mark Aspinall
Musical director/Conductor – Livi van Warmerlo