While this play has toured widely and won many accolades this is its first production in London. The Finborough is an ideal setting for such an intimate and intense one-man show, and offers another instance of how a small pub theatre can punch way above its weight in showcasing work of rare quality.
This is a true story, a veritable ‘voyage around my father’, by actor Matthew Zajac. The action alternates between Zajac enacting episodes from the remarkable life of his Polish father Mateusz, and his own search for his father’s roots and relations after his death. It is a real acting tour de force and also – a real rarity – it finds new and memorable things to say about the intolerable choices and experiences of living and surviving at the heart of the conflict between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
At the start the man we encounter is a modest unassuming tailor of Polish extraction and Scottish adoption – the eponymous tailor of Inverness, resettling there and starting a family after World War Two. But gradually we learn that Mateusz spent his early years in a rural community Galicia, from which he was forcibly conscripted into the Soviet Army, then captured by and incorporated into the German army before escaping and emerging to fight with the British in the invasion of Italy, and ultimately choosing Britain as his long-term home. With a few well-chosen props and costumes and a vivid physical performance Zajac brings to life his father’s relationships and the terrors and adventures of his journeyings. One episode in which he spins a rack of clothes around himself to simulate one train journey after another is especially concise and evocative.
Gradually the reliability of this account begins to erode and multiple versions proliferate designed to suit different audience at different times. We are led to reflect on how in wartime memories are often selective and in fact a definitive account of anything can rarely be obtained. Emergency circumstances and the instinct for survival dictate a resourcefulness and lack of scruple that does not bear examination in peacetime.
Alongside the action a violinist – Jonny Hardie in this performance – sits and provides an evocative underscore that suggests both the world of folk music in Eastern Europe and Scottish dance music. This has the effect of economically summoning up a whole world of emotional associations that fuse memorably with the text and its powerful delivery. As the action proceeds video projections appear at the back of the set together with translated surtitles of the sections in Polish. At points it would have helped if Zajac were more centrally positioned in the set so the eye did not have to switch continually between text and actor, but this is a small cavil. The grainy recorded videos of Zajac’s interviews with family and other survivors in Poland in the 1990s are powerfully realised and need little commentary to bring them to vivid life.
As so often the limitations of a small space concentrates the mind of the designer. Ali Maclaurin suggests the world of a tailor economically with a wall of clothes at the back and a bench and a dummy to either side of the stage, leaving just enough space for the two performers to deliver the action in between.
The piece is just the right length and packs a real punch so that we leave the theatre with much to think about and resonant memories of a magnificent performance.
Written & Performed by Matthew Zajac
Director: Ben Harrison
Violinist: Jonny Hardie
Photo Credit: Peter Morozzo
Until 8th June 2024
80 mins, no interval