THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS at the Finborough Theatre

★★★

“Zajac’s performance is subtle and intense. Emotions flicker beautifully across his face”

The Tailor of Inverness tells the story of Mateusz Zajac (father of writer/performer Matthew Zajac) a Polish born tailor, who settled in Inverness after the Second World War.

The difficulty is that the story is simply presented as The Tailor telling us about his life. There is no mystery or dramatic question. A buried truth does come to light, and with it questions around the honesty of our narrator, but this happens so late in the play that it’s hard to care.

His life story is interesting, as with many of the stories of displaced Europeans in the 20th century. However, the structure is aimless and the details dense and lengthy.

That said, Zajac’s performance is subtle and intense. Emotions flicker beautifully across his face. He brings his father to life with a quiet complexity of accent and physicality. His accent – a Scottish-Polish hybrid – is maintained impeccably throughout, and a real sense of the man is evoked.

Ben Harrison’s direction is varied, working with the story to create light and shade. The storytelling style is broken with dramatic sketches of the past, and with song and poetry. Some of this is recorded with Magdalena Kaleta reciting in Polish. Harrison’s choices, along with sound design by Timothy Brinkhurst, work with the narration to create a strong picture of this man’s world. The piece is accompanied throughout by Jonny Hardy (in some performances it’s Amy Geddes) on the violin, bringing a haunting melancholy to the stage.

Much of the script is in Polish, and a little Russian, with subtitles projected onto the backdrop. The use of AV throughout is carefully and well crafted. A map accompanies the description of Zajac’s time serving during the war, flagging key cities and tracing the route. Photographs of the family are projected and flashes of memory are echoed with images. This works well with Kai Fischer’s subtly shifting lighting.

Ali Maclaurin’s set sees flattened and plastered clothing pasted against the backdrop, nodding to Zajac’s profession, while evoking the horrors of mass slaughter which he remembers. It’s a thoughtful and well executed idea.

While Zajac’s story is interesting, it felt too long a piece to coast on that. I was more interested in his time in Scotland, and the experiences of Matthew Zajac himself returning to Poland to uncover the truth of his father’s past (this made up the final third of the play) than the details of his father’s time in the war, during which I got a little lost.

THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS at the Finborough Theatre

Reviewed on 17th May 2024

by Auriol Reddaway

Photography by Tim Morozzo

Previously reviewed at this venue:

BANGING DENMARK | ★★★ | April 2024

FOAM | ★★★★ | April 2024

JAB | ★★★★ | February 2024

THE WIND AND THE RAIN | ★★★ | July 2023

SALT-WATER MOON | ★★★★ | January 2023

PENNYROYAL | ★★★★ | July 2022

THE STRAW CHAIR | ★★★ | April 2022

THE SUGAR HOUSE | ★★★★ | November 2021

THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS

Click here to see our Recommended Shows page

★★★

“It becomes too clever and self-aware and we disengage”

Above Edinburgh on the Salibury Crags, Declan, a talented, working class young artist pulls a body back as it tries to jump. This body belongs to Libby, a middle-aged, middle class fading playwright who is drunkenly considering the end. So two worlds meet. As Declan talks about the realities of his life, an abusive step-father, his love for his little sister, Libby begins to write for the first time in far too long. She needs his story, she needs his words, but at that point, the play asks, does telling someone’s story become exploiting it?

Lorn Macdonald as Declan is the heart and energy of the piece. He comes to life, quick and funny, surprising and vulnerable. His story is the one we are interested in hearing, and Macdonald is simply fire on stage. I cannot fault his performance. Unfortunately Neve McIntosh’s Libby feels comparatively unreal. This is not her fault, but an impossibility within the way the character is written. She is unlikeable throughout. Her suicide attempt, which opens the story, is so lightly commented upon in the rest of the play that it seems completely unbelievable and rather half-hearted, trivialising suicide, and contributing to a version of Libby that is self-absorbed and ingenuine. She is used as a device by the playwright (Kieran Hurley) to make comments about the world of theatre, meaning she struggles to emerge. He gives her an extended monologue about the state of playwriting, about theatres and audiences, that is so self-aware it makes us self-aware. That isn’t a character speaking, and it removes us from the world of the play with immediate effect. Even her trajectory isn’t believable. She jumps from suicidal to mentor to lover to exploiter with no apparent journeys in between.

Mouthpiece is interspersed by Libby directly addressing the audience, telling us what makes a good play, walking us through the necessary ingredients as they are created onstage, foreshadowing the way the narrative must inevitably go. Sometimes this works really well. But the plot gets lost in this, and the end in particular suffers as a result. It stops being about the characters, about their story. It becomes too clever and self-aware and we disengage.

The story that is at the heart of ‘Mouthpiece’ is a fascinating one of an unlikely relationship, of exploitation, class and culture, but it gets lost in a weary exercise of meta-theatricality, in an attempt to comment on playwriting, when the story is powerful enough to make this comment on its own. Let the story speak, and we will be powerless not to listen.

Reviewed by Amelia Brown

Photography by Roberto Ricciuti

THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS at the Finborough Theatre

★★★

“Zajac’s performance is subtle and intense. Emotions flicker beautifully across his face”

THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS at the Finborough Theatre

Reviewed on 17th May 2024

by Auriol Reddaway

Photography by Tim Morozzo

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS

THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS

Soho Theatre

Reviewed – 4th April 2019

★★★

“It becomes too clever and self-aware and we disengage”

Reviewed by Amelia Brown

Photography by Roberto Ricciuti

Mouthpiece

Soho Theatre until 4th May

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue: