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.