Call of the fun police answered

Playing a drunk burglar in the British slapstick comedy Noises Off was my dream role because I didn’t have to act. Falling through windows and accidentally walking off with other people’s stuff after a few champagnes is second nature to me. But it was not to be — the universe, thankfully, shut the door on any public attempt to reveal my true nature.

However, when I saw that Shepparton Theatre Arts Group needed an authority figure to stamp out all the frivolous nonsense of village life in Fiddler on the Roof, I answered the call.

Here was a chance to redeem my growing public reputation as a bumbling dilettante.

The Constable is the Russian Tsar’s agent who comes to tell the Jewish villagers they have to pack up and leave their homes in western Russia in the early part of the last century because, well, because they are Jews and that’s what powerful people do when they want popular support — pick on the weird little guys.

So just when the villagers are having a party, celebrating a wedding or generally enjoying life, the Constable marches in to spoil the fun. Now, for this I’m going to have to channel my inner spoilsport. It’s been a long time, but I can still remember telling a load of Rockboy’s pals to stop climbing on the furniture, smashing out Little Richard on the piano and drinking cask wine because it was four o’clock in the morning and it was time to pack up and go home.

Now I’m not a natural boss man, but it did feel good seeing these teenagers cowering in the corner and terrified of me telling their parents. So that’s what I’m using to generate feelings of limitless power. That, and my two fellow constables, who have big truncheons.

However, the role is not as straightforward as it looks. As with everyone you meet in life, the Constable is not just a simple bastard — he’s a conflicted bastard. He’s a Christian but he sympathises with the plight of the Jews and hates having to be the bearer of bad news.

His excuse is one that was to be used with terrifying repetition 40 years later at the Nuremberg trials.

“I was just following orders” is the underling’s lame justification for all acts of barbarism carried out on behalf of monsters.

Fiddler on the Roof is based on a series of stories by Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem about Jewish village life in Imperial Russia, published between 1894 and 1914.

Interestingly, when the play and then the film appeared in the 1960s some Jewish critics thought the stories were too sanitised for the American public. In the original stories, the Constable was a cruel brute instead of a sympathiser, and the drama ended with the main character, Tevye, alone, his wife, Golde, dead and his family gone instead of escaping to the freedom of America.

Fiddler is one of those musicals that has survived the test of time because it tells real stories about the ordinary dramas of family life set against the broader canvas of prejudice and conflict. Sadly, some things never change.

Then of course, we have the music.

If I Were a Rich Man sings to all the Amazon employees, ripped-off migrant workers and downtrodden dreamers living in a world of billionaires.

“If I were a rich man

Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum

All day long, I’d biddy biddy bum.”

Exactly. I’ll second that.

• STAG’s Fiddler on the Roof will be performed at WestSide Performing Arts Centre in Mooroopna from September 15 to 23. Tickets are on sale at riverlinksvenues.com.au

With a cast of more than 50 talented local people including two youth ensembles, this show promises to be one big community experience packed with dancing, music and heart.