Matthew Zajac on the London premiere of The Tailor of Inverness

Admired playwright and actor Matthew Zajac offers a glimpse into the upcoming London premiere of his esteemed play, The Tailor of Inverness, set to grace the Finborough Theatre stage from May 14th to June 8th, 2024.

This rendition, rich with themes of displacement, survival, and identity, promises to resonate with audiences. Drawing from his own familial history, Zajac crafts a poignant narrative tracing the journey of a Polish tailor from the fields of Galicia to the Scottish Highlands. In this in-depth interview, Zajac provides insights into the production’s evolution, shedding light on the meticulous craftsmanship and emotional depth that underpin this acclaimed work. Matthew was kind enough to answer a few questions from theQR, so settle in for a fascinating Q&A…

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Matthew, what inspired you to tell the story of The Tailor of Inverness? do you remember the moment the spark of the idea first formed in your mind?

I was trying to write a book about my dad’s story. This was a daunting task, as I’d never seriously considered being a writer. This was in the early 2000s. I’d discovered revelatory things about him in 2003 when I first visited my dad’s birthplace in Western Ukraine. I knew I had a strong story. I’ve spent most of my working life producing, directing and acting in new plays, so it occurred to me that I should try writing it as a play first, and that’s what I did. The book came later. I suppose the first spark came long before all that, in 1988, when I persuaded my dad to talk on record about his life. Those tapes lay in a box for a long time before I dug them out and started working on them.

The play has garnered numerous awards and accolades over the years. What do you think it is about this story that resonates so deeply with audiences around the world?

It’s a story about the impact of war on ordinary people and families, and about family secrets. Virtually every family is affected by one or both of these things. Not long after the show first opened in 2008, I remember a Polish woman telling me that the play tells the story of every Polish family.

Could you share some of the challenges you faced in bringing such a deeply personal and complex narrative to the stage?

I held off making the story public for a number of years as I was concerned about upsetting my mum and sisters by revealing long-buried secrets. It took 18 months of persuasion before mum agreed to give me permission to obtain dad’s British army record. My mixed Polish-Ukrainian-Scottish heritage is a blessing to me, but the experience of all those men and women from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states who settled in the UK after the war is indeed complex and unknown to the great majority of the British public. I’ve been visiting Poland and latterly Ukraine since I was two years old, so I grew up with some kind of understanding of the turbulent 20^th century history of that region, but I needed to read a lot to understand it more deeply and objectively.

The protagonist’s journey spans a tumultuous period in European history, including experiences of war, displacement, and rebuilding. How did you navigate portraying these historical events while maintaining the personal closeness of the story?

Western Ukraine and Poland were, I think, the most dangerous places to be during World War 2. So many were murdered there. There was a war within a war between Ukrainians and Poles, with Ukrainians taking revenge on their former Polish masters for quite brutal suppression of Ukrainian nationalism in the years before the war. And there was the Holocaust, utterly devastating for the vibrant Jewish population there. The play isn’t about the Holocaust, but I couldn’t ignore it. Pidhaitsi, the town close to my father’s village where he trained to be a tailor was essentially a Jewish town before the war, with about a 70% Jewish population. 90% of Galicia’s tailors were Jewish, so my father would almost certainly have been trained by Jewish tailors.

He told me there was just a single Jewish family in his village, the rest of the inhabitants were Poles and Ukrainians. That family disappeared. Around 60 Poles in the village were murdered by Ukrainian militia men in 1943-44. My grandmother was Ukrainian, my grandfather Polish. A strange fact is that the sons in such a mixed marriage before the war there were registered as Poles, while the daughters were registered as Ukrainians, so my uncles were Poles and my aunt was Ukrainian. She had a son who supported the Ukrainian Partisan army and he was killed by occupying Soviet troops in summer 1944.

It was a challenge to tell this complicated history, both on a macro- and micro-level, but at the same time, the personal experiences mentioned above, connected to my family history and the rest of my father’s story, which will remain incomplete forever as there are long periods of the war where his exact whereabouts and actions are unknown, gave me a through line to connect the levels. This carries on through the play into my own story of discovery. There are two characters in this play- me and him.

Your father’s story which forms the heart of The Tailor of Inverness reveals secrets and experiences that were previously unknown to you. How did you grapple with this discovery personally, and what motivated you to share it with the public?

Like most people, my father wasn’t a hero. You could say his survival was heroic, in a way, but he didn’t want to be a soldier, he wanted to go to Warsaw to make his fortune and ply his trade. He was a very good tailor, very popular in the Highlands! It’s just like that for all those poor people right now in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Syria. The great majority want to live a peaceful life where they have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. But we have these psychopathic bastards destroying the lives of the peace-loving majority. It’s a sickness. I’m very sad that this play has become even more relevant now than it was when it opened 16 years ago, but that’s also why I keep doing it.

With the current conflicts in Eastern Europe echoing the experiences of your father’s generation, how do you see The Tailor of Inverness speaking to contemporary audiences and issues?

I think the show is a window into some of the painful history that has led to the war in Ukraine. The great tragedy is that the Russians seem to have learned nothing from their 20^th century. I had a hope that there was a universality to the story when I first wrote it. I certainly didn’t expect the production to last all this time and travel so widely. But my hope proved to be justified. The show has received a powerful response from audiences wherever we’ve played it. In a way, the show is a warning about the folly of war and I hope that it can also galvanise a kind of gut response of protest against it and an understanding that it’s vital to be vigilant, ready to protect and, yes, fight for the freedoms we can take for granted.

After 16 years of presenting this play, what keeps you returning to it, and what do you hope audiences take away from experiencing The Tailor of Inverness for the first time in London?

It’s the audiences that keep me going, their responses to the piece, the sharing of the story, the palpable tension in the theatre for the 80 minutes of the show, the joy and the pain of it. It certainly has a cathartic effect on me! I remember one critic right at the start who bucked the trend of great reviews, suggesting it was more therapeutic for me than for the audience! I met him sometime later and he apologised, though I had to admit that it is therapeutic for me! I just think it is for the audience too.

I feel quite confident about that after 280 performances where we get more or less the same response every time. As for what the audience takes away, well, I think every good piece of theatre is a sharing of human experience, a kind of dialogue between the actors and the audience, an acknowledgement of what it is to be human in the most fundamental sense.

I have always tried to make theatre that touches people emotionally and simultaneously makes intellectual demands on them. That’s good theatre for me, good art. It makes us human beings stronger, kinder, smarter.

The Tailor of Inverness is presented by Dogstar Theatre Company in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre

Featured Image: Tim Morozzo

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For tickets, and more information on The Tailor of Inverness, click here.

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