THEATRE
Sexless in Gauze
Fiddler on the Roof. (Her Majesty's.)—She Stoops to Conquer. (Yvonne Arnaud, Guild- ford.) FIDDLFIDDLER on the Roof is far and away the ER musical I have seen since I took on this job, which is saying absolutely nothing. For the past eighteen months, London musicals have all been saccharine in outlook, frenzied in move- ment and anything from ten to fifty years out of date to look at. All seem to work on advertising principles—peddling spurious dreams at furious pace in opulent packaging—but fashions in ads change fast, which musical-makers don't seem to have noticed, nor the fact that sex in adland is a prime source of wit, energy, and glamour. Sex —judging at least by the recent drab procession of heroines, all for one reason or another un- touchable, and their strings of wooden suitors—is a closed book to the musical, and the packaging suffers accordingly. Waterfalls, seaspray, fast cars and leather goods, getaway land in short, with its equivalent sharp, stylistic virtues, is out. Instead we are landed squarely back in the world of the Ovaltine girl, dreaming on her lonesome pillow or floating down the wind nursing a wheatsheaf; the world of those two quaint, bon- neted tots on railway hoardings who toil hand- in-hand uphill towards the future, or the little old cobbler in steel-rimmed spectacles tapping away with a little old hammer at his stick-a-soles.
Fiddler is no exception to the rule, if anything embraces it more heartily than usual : it has no less than three Ovaltine girls in modest home- spun gowns, two regulation tots and any amount of little old cobblers. This is a costume piece, set among rustic Russian Jews at the turn of the century, and though the sets are a hideously botched attempt at poorman's folkart, Patricia Zipprodt's costumes in well-chosen sombre colours are a treat by musical standards: heavy, woollen petticoats, hair scraped back under sober headscarves, even the odd tasteful rag and tatter. One almost has the feeling that in time, with luck, the musical might catch up with the kitchen-sink movement in the theatre. Fiddler, as it happens, has a kitchen sink, but the outfit comes straight from Cinderella, along with pristine scrubbing brushes and brooms stowed hastily in pails to clear the ground for a spot of the old knees up.
This dancing, by Jerome Robbins, and the music by Jerry Bock, are what put Fiddler a cut above others of its kind. That is to say, the music is sprightly and the dancers all fit and scrupu- lously drilled—heads erect, shoulders back, tum- mies in—which, while it is the least one might expect, is very much more than we generally get. But, though Mr Robbins is for all I know the only professional in the field, his American Dream has no inkling of horizons beyond the gymnasium, and suffers as much as any village panto from endless clumsy excuses—the lads sidling up for a chat, the lasses tripping by to the well—for cavorting in the old market square.
The book and lyrics, by Joseph Stein and Sheldon Harnick, are a load of the usual antique drivel, reaching an amazing low on the Sabbath day when a black gauze veil comes down from the flies and behind it family groups, picked out in fairy lights, cut off at the bust and dangling in mid-air, form a rapt, angelic choir. The hero of this jolly do is Tevye the milkman, a senti- mental peasant forever chatting up his Maker as he trundles by with barrow or hangs out his cheeses on a kind of milkman's gibbet. Tevye has three blushing daughters which means three true love matches and three long, slow, feeble proposal scenes. This is roughly all the plot— true, one of the lasses reveals unwholesome ten- dencies towards new-fangled learning, when a book tumbles out of her pinny; and one of the lads turns out to be the eternal student from Kiev, with peaked cap, radical leanings and a yen to serve humanity—'the greatest work that a man can do' (and, if it took him half a century to filter through from the legitimate stage to the musical, what price kitchen sink?).
But these are the worst mishaps that may be- fall. True, again, great things are stirring—revolu- tion, Tsarist pogroms, deportation to Siberia—in the world beyond, but all laid on by a thought- ful management to provide that extra touch of comfort, a tiny gleam of tears in this vale of happiness. Siberia, in this context, is Noddyland, and when the pogrom starts you may be sure it will only mean a visit from your friendly neigh- bourhood policeman, played with absolutely no conviction by a jolly, red-faced English gent.
Topol's chief distinction, as our hero, is that, being thirty-one, he still plays a gnarled and bearded middle-aged man with great aplomb. Musicals often seem to set excessive store by what are, after all, comparatively humdrum physical feats. The best thing in the show is Miriam Karlin as his bony wife, with Linda Gardner a close second as her middle daughter. Both are instinctively ironic, and do not seem to share the general belief on stage that life is a dreary junior fairy-tale.
Meanwhile, in darkest Surrey, a delicious pro- duction of She Stoops to Conquer (by James Grout for the Oxford Playhouse Company) brings us smartly back to the modern world. The country, after all, today as in 1771, bristles with dim, elderly failures, snazzy cits, young hopefuls cooped up in the provinces and yearning toward the bright lights. Prettiest of them all and wittiest is Rodney Bewes's Antony Lumpkin—none of your usual hard-breathing, mud-spattered louts, this is a prim, complacent miniature humorist who has the number of the adult set-up and
should go far. •
HILARY SPURLING
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