'This is a show about love' - Inside Fiddler on the Roof as it heads to Nottingham

Direct from a completely sold-out season at London’s Barbican Theatre and ahead of the production making its way to Nottingham, Fiddler on the Roof stands apart, whether you’re coming to the material for the first time or you already recognise the story of a Jewish community seeking refuge from the fearsome pogroms of Czarist Russia in 1905. (The show’s sources are various short stories from the Yiddish playwright-author Sholem Aleichem.)

As directed by the expatriate American Jordan Fein, the production was first produced at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, garnering 13 Olivier nominations in April and winning three, including best musical revival. Told with unusual intensity of feeling and a revelatory attention to detail, the show felt that much deeper and richer when it transferred indoors to the Barbican Centre in London. That same staging, partially recast, is now touring the UK, much to the delight of its four principal performers.

“This feels freshly minted,” says Matthew Woodyatt, who has the leading role of Tevye. What Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein created over 60 years ago endures: they’ve created “such a masterpiece,” says Woodyatt, “that everything you need is there – it’s all so strong and clear.” Within its structure is room for the individual to shine, which in Woodyatt’s case has meant bringing his own Welsh accent to the part and not having to mimic those who came before him.

Tevye, says Woodyatt, “is such a glorious role. He contains multitudes, really – anger and love and wit and silliness.” You note his struggle to hold together a family threatened by fragmentation, alongside his ongoing conversation with God, not to mention such knockout numbers as If I Were A Rich Man and the show’s thrilling opening, Tradition. “Tevye’s relationship with God is directed outfront to the audience, which gives you a window to his soul. I would say I feel an elated exhaustion by the end, and I find it very energising, even though it’s a huge physical role.”

And the direct-address nature of Tevye, performed as here in the actor’s own accent, ramps up the intimacy, even in a large auditorium. “You never feel you’re watching a costume drama; there’s an immediacy to these conversations, as if they were happening now.”

The production’s Golde, Tevye’s ever-patient wife, is new to the touring cast, though the performer Jodie Jacobs had seen and greatly admired Fein’s staging. “When I was younger,” Jacobs says, “I might have felt Fiddler was perhaps a little dull, but I wasn’t as engaged politically then as I am now.” What’s changed? Her awareness, she says, of “the resilience and the power” of the show, alongside a sense that it allows her to inhabit “a space where you can be unashamedly proud of your faith and your community”.

Beverley Klein, the production’s Olivier-nominated Yente, had worked with Fein, the director, on the ongoing West End revival of Cabaret before taking the decision to join a show she knows so well, having twice previously appeared as Golde.

“I do think this is a piece of genius,” she says of Fiddler, in which her gossip-mongering matchmaker gains many of the show’s laughs. “The juxtaposition between serious matter and the musical form is balanced in such an incredible way, and there’s not a wasted line. [Joseph Stein’s] book is as good as it gets.” Early in her career, she played the Innkeeper’s wife in a touring Fiddler, starring Alfred Marks. “I’ve been working for 45 years and seem to have done a different Fiddler once every decade.”

Perhaps the staging’s greatest innovation is its use of the fiddler of the title. As reconceived for this production, he’s no longer a decorative element of the story but, instead, a sort of shadow-self to Tevye. The character here appears regularly throughout, which in turn allowed the Anglo-Israeli violinist Raphael Papo to get his own Olivier nod for the role – quite an achievement for a non-speaking part.

The idea this time out, recalls Papo, “wasn’t about, let’s put a violinist onstage and get him to play pretty tunes, but, actually, why am I playing at which moments and what am I trying to say with what I’m playing.”

This fiddler, in Papo’s assessment, is “an extension of Tevye’s emotions, who can sort of reflect things back at Tevye that can’t be put into words. Every time Tevye is talking to God, the fiddler is there listening. In performance, I’m trying to sound like [the musical equivalent of] a human voice, not like some nice violinist”.

What of the onward resonance of the piece? Matthew Woodyatt is sure that “50-60 years from now, Fiddler will remain every bit as topical as it is now”: its themes are at once timeless and universal. Says Raphael Papo: “This is a show about love, it really is – about family and love and a shared humanity. I can’t think of any better way of putting it than that.” Fiddler belongs to the past and the present and, no doubt, the future, too.

Fiddler on the Roof runs at the Royal Concert Hall from Tuesday August 19 to Saturday August 23. Visit trch.co.uk or call 0115 989 5555 to book.