Fiddler on the Roof - Regents Park OAT

Yes!! I was lucky today on Rush

5 stars, incredible.

It’s such an interesting choice in this production, to make the set heavily spotlight territory and place, in a way that the writing hardly does. It’s kept me thinking, including some uncomfortable thoughts about the end.

There’s such a contrast between the opening numbers in this and the director’s previous London show. In ‘Oklahoma!’ Curly’s ‘Oh What A Beautiful Mornin’ has him at one with nature. He even seems in conversation with it - a hangover from Lynn Riggs original play where it’s implied that Curly, Aunt Eller, and others have mixed ‘Indian’ heritage. Though too skimpy in the musical, by the end they’re negotiating a new constitution - joining the federation of the USA as a brand new state, but asserting that soil defines them more than any new federal rules: “we know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand”. It’s all about territory and place.

‘Fiddler On The Roof’s opening is all ‘Tradition’, which isn’t about territory, but portable - if you can hold onto it. The line ‘we always keep our hats on’ a reminder to be portable at a moment’s notice, as Jewish people have too often needed to be.

But the set has the field peeled back with roots hanging down, the place name stamped deep through its layers of sediment, and the action taking place not on the fields, but deep within the soil itself. Tradition still needs a place to settle and lay its hat for a while of course, but this set design seems to level up the claims of Territory and Tradition in the piece in a way I haven’t seen before.

At the end the characters say (more than once) of Anatevka: “It’s just a place”. Maybe it’s what they have to tell themselves to lessen the pain; or perhaps being predisposed to Tradition more than Place they really are more phlegmatic in taking that more valuable portable thing with them and starting again (with some able to join other previous family emigres).

I may have felt this discomfort anyway - but with that Set I found it hung heavy that in 2024 Tevye’s descendents might say about another group’s loss of land: “ah well, it’s just a place”.

I think this production softens matchmaker Yente’s late statement about moving to Israel (as other productions have done), so that she’s going there to innocuously make marriage matches, without an agenda for the result: to embed the population through procreation, which was the original line (“I’ll arrange marriages, yes? So I’m going to the Holy Land to help our people increase and multiply. It’s my mission”).

I’m glad this production didn’t become controversial in the current climate - but that set provoked some interesting and uncomfortable thoughts, in me anyway.

Hazarding a guess it will be cancelled tonight. Not convinced my performance on Wednesday will go ahead either looking at the forecast. That’ll teach me to wait until the final week.

Was it cancelled this week?

Yippee! I just got the last ticket for the final performance on Saturday evening! Been scanning the OAT site for days!!!!!

Wow this is pretty risky to have a show running till the end of September

It has to be bad if they cancel it. Such a shame.

Have actually managed to get a closing night ticket from TodayTix on the drops for just £12.50! Amazing, and Saturday looks clear

Right next to me!

Another excellent (and final) performance of this great production on Saturday night, played out under clear and chilly skies. This show deserves a future life.