Matthew Zajac is an actor, director, producer, playwright and current artistic director of Scotland-based Dogstar Theatre Company. You may have spotted him on TV: he had bit parts in Happy Valley, Inspector George Gently or Taggart. A household name he is not. His personal cache hardly matters, however, as you will want to watch The Tailor of Inverness at Finborough Theatre simply because it’s now part of the oral and social history of wartime survivors in Europe.
His father had succeeded in giving his family a happy, comfortable life in Scotland, shielded from the horrors of WWII. His childhood Summers in 1970s Poland were sheer fun. But after his father’s death, Zajac started digging into the family roots, and what he uncovered is a tale of reinvention, resourcefulness, deeply mixed heritage and moral ambiguity he was hardly prepared for.
The surprises are many and this one act play delivers them with little sentimentality, zero judgment but with rich historical detail. Galicia, where Zajac’s father grew up in the thirties, was ethnically mixed, geographically in Poland, yet home to Ukrainian and German speaking communities. Catholics, Orthodox and Jews often shared the same place of worship, with celebrations on alternate days.
Mixed marriages were common: their offspring were registered at birth as Polish if male, and Ukrainian if female. None of this diversity even registered before racial laws and nationalism made their first appearance after the German and then Soviet invasions following 1939. A region, previously at peace with multicultural cohabitation, was thus consigned to civil war and ferocious ethnic and nationalist purges from both the Polish and Ukrainian side.
Borders moved and peoples moved with them: Galicia became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and thus of the USSR. Zajac’s father was swept up in the invading army first and then in the allied forces. His grandparents stayed in the same village, waiting for their son to return at the end of the war but return he did not, fearing a spell of “re-education” in Soviet gulags reserved to those who might have absorbed capitalist values while in the West. He was demobilised in the UK and chose Inverness – hence ‘The Tailor of Inverness’ – as his new home, reticent to offer too much detail of his whereabouts or which army’s uniform he had actually been wearing during the war.
The one who did return to the grandparents’ village – in a newly independent Ukraine, following the demise of the Iron Curtain – is the adult Zajac, discovering a half-sister, an entirely Ukrainian side of the family and a father’s lies. These uncomfortable truths are revealed with great affection and empathy, accompanied by many poetic interludes of village and army life, and by the sound of a violinist playing live on stage, transporting the audience instantly back in time and space.
Acting in The Tailor of Inverness is impeccable, shifting the narrator imperceptibly between Zajac and his father. Spectacles, scissors and measuring tape are the only theatrical devices used to mark the one from the other.
The staging is minimal but effective. Clothes of all sizes are plastered over and whitewashed to create a visually arresting backdrop: a semantic play on fabrication for sure, but also a reference to the fabric of community, to the mountains of discarded clothes of Auschwitz and Birkenau, to wearing other people’s clothes before we judge, and to identities as truths that we stitch together for ourselves.