Stinging with hard-earned knowledge and sadly all-too-relevant, The Tailor of Inverness is a putting work of theatre, now taking part in on the Finborough Theatre
“I’m from right here“
Because the spectre of battle casts a chilly shadow as soon as extra over Europe’s japanese reaches, Matthew Zajac’s 2008 play The Tailor of Inverness arrives on the Finborough Theatre for its London premiere with a sadly renewed relevance. A deeply private one-man-show, directed with actual emotional readability by Ben Harrison, it interprets the specificities of that have right into a wider lesson concerning the painful and pernicious impact of warfare, in methods wherein we’d not have beforehand thought-about and which demand our consideration as soon as once more.
The play is nominally about Zajac’s father – the titular tailor – and Zajac Jnr introduces us to him in his workshop, his chirpy brogue takes us by way of a few of his journey from his Polish birthplace to the Scottish Highlands, Polish-language flashbacks exploring a few of his childhood video games. However any private historical past of the mid-twentieth century needs to be formed by the Second World Battle and on this explicit area, its traumatic ripples hit significantly arduous. (I don’t know whether it is deliberate however one thing concerning the element of Ali Maclaurin’s patchworked again drop recalled one of many rooms at Auschwitz.)
The tales that Zajac’s father instructed him replicate that sophisticated historical past – imprisonment by Soviets, launch below amnesty by Nazis, enlisting after which preventing with the British Military – however as he, and ultimately we, come to understand, these tales weren’t essentially true. And as he unpicks what information could possibly be sifted from the fiction, a stranger, sadder story emerges as Zajac Jnr uncovers his precise household historical past. Soundtracked by some gorgeously evocative reside violin (Jonny Hardy at this efficiency, alternating with Amy Geddes), there’s one thing unimaginably profound right here.
I say unimaginably, although it’s the expertise of too many on this planet proper now. The truth of fluctuating borders (that birthplace in Japanese Poland is now in Western Ukraine) and what meaning for one’s identification is deeply thought-provoking, the challenges of setting up the facade of the ‘acceptable migrant’ is one which nonetheless resonates so strongly at this time, the impossibilities of inauspicious selections about members of the family virtually an excessive amount of to bear.
Operating time: 80 minutes (with out interval) Images: Tim Morozzo The Tailor of Inverness is reserving on the Finborough Theatre till eighth June
