The title comes from one of Chagall's famous series of pictures with fiddlers, bridal couples, cows and more, flying over Russian villages - crazy and delightful. The fiddler is a visual metaphor of survival through tradition and joyfulness.

The musical itself is based on the books of Sholem Aleichem, especially Tevye's Daughters. Tevye is a milkman with five daughters (who will all need husbands) living in a small Russian village in 1905 where Jews and Russians co-exist uneasily. Tevye is a warm and complex character, loving, humorous, devout but questioning, wanting to be rich but also to be a scholar, rooted in tradition by struggling to accept new ideas.

The play is very truthful to the book. Sholem Aleichem writes as though he and Tevye

The music you will hear tonight is also true to the way of life that Sholem Aleichem knew and wrote about. It is full of exuberance and also sadness, of deep religious feeling as well as some macabre "happenings". You leave the theatre humming the songs, but at a deeper level you are also haunted by them.

Perhaps the great strength and the great sadness of Fiddler on the Roof is that, although we are separated from the people of Anatevka by over a century and by a thousand miles, their feelings are as recognisable today in a world where there is still hatred between people of different races and religions, but where courage, dignity and humour still shine through.