Artistic director Daniel Evans’ canny all-things-to-all-people programming, which served both him and audiences in Sheffield so well, are now on show at Chichester. Last week’s openings in the venue’s two spaces could scarcely be more different in form and mood, yet each in its way shows all too human beings struggling to come to terms with a changing world. In the main house, Evans’ own revival of Fiddler On The Roof stars actor/comedian Omid Djalili as Tevye, trying to accept revolutionary notions such as marriage for love while his shtetl faces the institutionalised brutality of the Russian pogroms; in the Minerva, Deborah Bruce’s play The House They Grew Up In is a bizarre but affecting portrait of a pair of reclusive, mentally ill misfits victimised by their neighbours.

As a director in his own right, Evans’ hallmark has become finding the beating heart of classic musicals without melting into sentimentality. Fiddler often flirts outrageously with oy-vey-ish stereotypes, but Evans and his company make these episodes mere parts of a fabric which also has much darker threads running through it.

In the 25 years since I gave him his first proper review, Djalili has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for playing bumbling Arabs, whilst in parallel building a reputation as a smart, likeable stand-up comic. It’s a combination which stands him in good stead as Tevye. In the first half, the muted nature of his participation in Alistair David’s ebullient choreography suggests that he might be mistakenly standing on his dignity; however, he proves unafraid to display Tevye’s own faults, yet wrestles with them to become a figure of support and compassion as events proceed to the dark finale in which the entire village is cleared of its Jewish population. Tracy-Ann Oberman as Tevye’s wife Golde provides a fine, flinty complement to Djalili, with a clutch of younger actors personifying the changes in the wind.

Across the way in the Minerva, the central couple are Samantha Spiro and Daniel Ryan as sister and brother Peppy and Daniel, living a hidden life in south-east London in a house packed to the rafters with all sorts of, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. When any third figure enters, there is scarcely room for all three to share Max Jones’ jaw-dropping set, never mind to move past each one another.

The main third-person is eight-year-old Ben from next door (at the preview I saw, an excellent Rudi Millard), whose curiosity about Daniel’s social dissocation and eidetic memory (basically, he’s the Rain Man of Lewisham) lead him to visit compulsively despite discouragement from both Daniel and the far edgier, obsessive-compulsive and schizophrenic Peppy. When one of Ben’s visits – again, at his own instigation – lasts overnight, his family, the neighbours and of course the police leap to the shrillest of contemporary conclusions. Under nudging questioning by a police officer, Ben offers that Daniel had a book with “a picture of a baby with no clothes on”; the book may well be Gombrich’s The Story Of Art, as both siblings but Peppy in particular are obsessed with Italian Cinquecento painting.

Several of the supporting characters introduced in the second half – notably Ben’s snappish mother and a manipulative neighbour – seem to constitute easy ogre-figures, but it must be admitted that they’re not actually implausible (and Ben’s mother gains an offstage redemption). Jeremy Herrin for co-producers Headlong directs with his customary incisiveness; Spiro in particular gives one more in a series of performances that keep broadening her already brilliant palette; and Jones pulls off a simple yet glorious coup at the end of each half. Bruce offers an upbeat ending which avoids sentimentality just as Evans does in the main house, and a sympathetic look at modern urban hermitry and the pitfalls of excessive co-dependency.

Written for the Financial Times.