Actor and singer Hannah Bristow sat down with fairypowered to answer 20 questions. Hannah is currently playing Chava on tour in Fiddler on the Roof. Due to appear at Leeds Grand Theatre from 2 August, tickets available here
Let’s start with a few favourites
Favourite show (whether you have been in it or not)?
I really like Sweeney Todd, which can sound like a weirdly morbid choice, but I think it’s not really about blood and pies, but actually about what happens when we put our love in the wrong places and how the hell we live with that yearning; plus booming strings and Sondheim’s Lyrics. Obsessed
Favourite book?
I really love “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke.
It’s written by a man in his 30s who somehow has written with the wisdom of someone three times that. It’s Rilke writing to his cousin who is an aspiring poet, and heartbroken, and anxious, and struggling, and probably depressed, and is about how to be an artist and and human, how to hold your own, how to deal with critics, how to feel your feelings, how to love and be loved, and create, and defy and continue in this tricky (and sometimes terribly painful) world we live in.
And I LOVED Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” which won the 2024 Booker this year. LOVED
Favourite theatre?
I grew up in the Midlands and I maintain that the Birmingham REP is the best designed theatre in the UK. It’s an amphitheatre that bows in the middle of each row: it’s huge, and yet because of that design everyone has a direct sightline to the stage, and when you play it (which I did in 2017), it has the intimacy of a studio. Everyone is like, folded on top of you, all 1000 of them. It’s awesome. It’s fire.
Now I live in London, and I really do love the National and go there maybe an unfashionable amount. Soho Theatre also does something extremely special. They’re both about variety, I guess. I’m into that
Favourite song?
Pass!I really like the album “Diamond Mine” by King Creosote, and John Hopkins. It’s an electronic remix of folk music recorded on cassette tapes, and Hopkins also mixes in ambient sound from King Creosote’s home town in Scotland. It’s a good headphone-dark-room-beginning-to-end sort of album. The third song, “Bats in the Attic” begins with an explosion of strings that never fails to make me cry
Favourite music?
I really like folk, the Bon Iver, Big Red Machine kind. I really like electronic music. I listen to a hell of a lot of pop. Good pop, bad pop, all pop
Favourite food?
I love sausages and mash. (I wasn’t raised kosher). Especially if it’s got cheese in it in the way they do in France sometimes
Favourite drink?
I’m usually making cups of very milky tea and leaving them half-drunk around and behind me wherever I go
What is your favourite role?
I am loving playing Chava in “Fiddler on the Roof”. She is me in lots of ways, and also isn’t me in others, and she has bored down inside me to carve an extremely special place in my heart. She is so loved and loving, and so defiant and true to herself, and so sure of what she wants and what she thinks is right. And she is so quietly clever. She’s so playful and silly too. I will miss her immensely when this job ends
What was your first role?
I was the Inn Keeper in the Nativity. I sat centrestage and grinned a lot as everyone else told the story around me
And what role would you really like to play?
We’ve already mentioned “Sweeney”, but Mrs Lovett is up there. There are also a lot of Shakespearean women I’d love to play, Queen Maragret in “Richard III”, Rosalind in “As You Like It”. I’d love to play any of the Ancient Greeks. I’d play any of the Alisons in “Fun Home” too. But mainly actually, a friend of mine about 10 years ago pointed out that the parts for me, for us, are still being written, and most haven’t been written yet. I want to play those, and lots of them
If you weren’t a performer what would you be?
Realistically, an English teacher. Unrealistically, an astrophysicist
What made you decide to be a performer?
I think I really really care about how people interact and communicate and why, and how feelings move us and charge us, and the question of how the hell do we co-exist in this tricky world where life can be so tough at times. I spend most of my time thinking about that. I think theatre is where we explore that together. Where we dig in and decide to all sit in a room and feel together and exercise our empathy.
Then, more superficially: I think I’m good at it; it gives me a stupid adrenaline-junkie rush; it’s the best job in the world. Those reasons. And because I’ve been lucky, and so far luck has let me be a performer
Do you enjoy touring?
I think we should make no bones about the fact that touring is tough. Eight three-hour shows a week is a lot, and more when you’re travelling from place to place between, and you’re away from your people, and your duvet, sofa and salt shaker. However, I have done a lot of touring, and it’s taught me a lot about how to carry and build your sense of home with you, and with the people you tour with.
I think theatre gets a bit stuck and overfocussed on London. It’s inevitable really, it’s where the money and work is, so we all move here and then it all just becomes a self-driving, inward-facing, self-feuling prophecy.
I think really often we forget that touring is what theatre is all about. The theatre’s routes are on the back of a Medieval wooden cart that moves from town to town. It’s about taking a story you care about to as many people as possible, because sharing storytelling is important. I grew up out of London, in Leicester, and I still remember the productions that toured to me and burnt into my retinas: and I walk past some of their posters on the walls of the Barbican corridors when I walk to my dressing room each day at the moment.
That’s what we’re doing with touring “Fiddler” right now. For better or for worse, at this moment, this play resonates for so many people in so many ways on so many corners and sides of politics. That feels vital. For me, it’s a play about love and empathy and how we need to move and change and adapt to sail the tide, to survive and remain united. Tides of change cannot be stopped. We cannot escape who we are or where we’ve come from, but community and seeing past what separates us to what can hold us together – while we hold on to ourselves – is what will save us. Balancing that is hard: but that’s living. It is a play about remembering that what unites us is more fruitful than what divides us; and, unfortunately too, a play that reminds us that power, oppression, displacement and division are perennial foes for humanity. It’s about what all those things mean for Jews and Judaism, but what they mean for everyone and everything else actually too. That’s why this play has endured, and that is something I am proud to take round the country… and am willing to miss my duvet for
What advice would you give 16 year old you?
That the thing that you think is strange or weird about you is actually the thing that makes you most interesting and watchable. That’s actually the thing people want to see; that’s what people want to watch; that’s what makes you valuable. The bravery to be vulnerable and show it openly and gently and truthfully to the world is the endeavour of a lifetime
Do you fancy branching out in Producing or Directing?
I think probably/maybe I will end up directing at some point. I love theatre too much and have too many opinions not to, I think. But honestly, who knows, I truly think directing is the hardest job in the room: you have to spin all the plates and manage everyone at the same time. Impossible.
I lack the skills to be a producer, I don’t know how they do it. They have my endless respect
What was the last stage show you saw and really enjoyed?
I recently saw “Here We Are” at the National, which is Sondheim’s last, half-written musical. It split audiences, but for me it was sort of perfect. It started as a big budget musical about the absurdity of the ultra-rich trying to find somewhere to have brunch in Manhattan, whilst their radical leftish cousin plotted the revolution that would end the world. By the second act, Sondeheim was dead, the music had dried up, the Revolution and Armageddon were happening, and the super rich were all confined to a single room with no water and no toilet and had to face the question of what we do when the world as we know it ends: when the water and the money dry up, who the hell do we become? It was what happened if a musical turned into an existentialist play; if Sondheim and Sartre collaborated, or had a baby. It was everything I love about theatre, asking all the questions I think we need to be asking in all the weirdest ways. I loved it
Favourite line from any show?
This is honestly an impossible question. But I’ll give you a line from our show as a compromise.
Mendel: “Rabbi, we’ve waited for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?”
Rabbi: “We’ll have to wait for him someplace else”
I think that’s sort of life in a nutshell
And/Or
I was in a kids’ Christmas show once where I played a reindeer who, at the start of the story, fell out of the sky into the middle of a safari park. Very shocking. Very out of place. Poor reindeer. Etc etc. I stood up, shook myself off, looked around and said “Wow, what is this place?!”
One night, at that moment, a child shouted, helpfully, at the top of their lungs, from the very back: “It’s a theatre!!”
That’s my favourite line from any show ever. Never has a truer word been spoken.
If you could be anyone else for the day, who would it be?
Maybe a carpenter who lives in the mountains somewhere. Somewhere warm. (I may just need a holiday). Or maybe someone like Trump, Bezos or Musk, so I could give myself a good talking to
What are the nicest/weirdest things you have ever received from fans?
I actually don’t get much of this, and am often leaving theatres late or in my own world and so am quite bad at engaging with people who might be wanting to do this sort of thing: for which I am honestly really sorry. But I’ve received some amazing cards and messages from people over the years, especially recently and that means loads.
But: My mum sends me flowers every opening night, and she’s my biggest fan. That’s the nicest thing
Can you tell us what you will be up to next?
I’m in Anatevka until early January 2026, that’s a long time, and it’s rare that I ever know what I’m doing more than 6 months in advance anyway. That’s sort of why I love acting. Change is the only constant: it’s such an honest career. So no, nothing to report for afterwards. For now. Something new, something else, something exciting, something I haven’t thought of yet. That’s the hope.
So in lieu of what’s next: come see what we’re doing now. We’re touring “Fiddler on the Roof” all over the UK and Ireland until January 2026. Heres to tour; to Life, L’Chaim
Fiddler on the Roof is on tour around the UK. Tickets can be found here