Writer: Matthew Zajac
Director: Ben Harrison
Far from revolving around Inverness, the life of this play’s titular tailor (Mateusz Zajac) is intimately linked to Poland and World War 2, and it’s no coincidence that the main character shares a surname with the writer and performer; Matthew Zajac has written a story not only about Poland’s tragic fate in the 20th century but also a personal tale about his father.
A story defined by the struggle over his father’s homeland and the war that tore it apart, we go from the Galician region of Poland to Russia after Mateusz’s capture by the Soviets, whisked off to a collective farm in Uzbekistan and sneaking off to Tehran, then recuperating in Cairo before finally assisting in the invasion of Italy and eventually finding a new home in Britain. Unfortunately, as varied as all this sounds, extremely little changes on stage with no attempt to bring these locations to life beyond projections of a map cast onto the back wall. Worse still, each has little flavour attached in the telling, with not much of note happening in any place beyond small bits of incidental exposition.
Where life is injected back into the play is from the non-linear interruptions of this journey, episodes plucked from the beginning and end of Mateusz’s life, from his years spent growing up in a Poland still recovering from World War 1 to his twilight years as a tailor in Inverness. These sections have a texture to them that is wonderfully brought out by Jonny Hardie on violin playing familiar themes for each as Zajac’s narrative at last achieves a little substance. If only more of the play could have felt as gripping.
The ending of the play does attempt a twist, with inconsistencies in Mateusz’s story mounting to an unsustainable level until suddenly we are no longer watching the son play his father – we are directly addressed by Matthew himself as he interrogates his father’s stories and eventually travels (in a journey illustrated by real-life videos projected onto the back wall) to Poland and Ukraine to find the truth behind his father’s life.
This appendix to the main story is an interesting attempt to re-contextualise the straightforward narrative that comes before it, smashing the fourth wall of the father’s story while trying to install a new one for the son’s, which ultimately lands as a glaring non-sequitur. Rather than saying something more that builds on the play’s existing themes, it feels self-indulgent, like we’re being made to sit through a slideshow of someone’s holiday photos. Fun for you perhaps, not so much for us.
Zajac is a wonderful actor who maintains excellent energy and emotional pacing throughout, but all the energy in the world can’t mask the fact that Zajac as a writer fails to create a compelling character out of either himself or his father and certainly not out of their lives.
Runs until 8 June 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Energetic but unengaging
