Review: Tailor of Inverness, Wickham Theatre

In a rare and disconcerting moment of eloquence, Joseph Stalin once noted that one human death is a tragedy, a million merely a statistic. If it’s possible even for a second to discount the genocidal cruelty apparently justified by this statement, we must, however reluctantly, admit that his words ring true. It is not possible to absorb the weight of each individual loss within the cataclysmic toll perpetrated by Stalin or the other murderous tyrants that reigned for much of the twentieth century in Europe and beyond.

But the extent of the tragedy of the Second World War, and the unimaginable brutality that accompanied it, is not even encapsulated by the terrible count of lives lost. Alongside that fallen legion, millions of others endured for years the most degrading of experiences through displacement, incarceration, torture, starvation and slavery. To pause sufficiently to comprehend every miserable episode against every individual is too much for any mind to comprehend. 

As a result, a play such as Matthew Zajac’s The Tailor of Inverness is not just welcome, but heroically necessary. In it we hear of one man’s story, as the cruel fortunes of war pluck him from a pastoral life in the Polish countryside and fling him into the fight not just for his country but subsequently, under duress, for both its invaders.

We hear how his community was almost literally decimated by the Holocaust – and how his family was torn apart, denied a sight of each other and condemned to a nomadic existence of forced marches and hair’s-breadth escapes from the deathly forces that consumed large swathes of our continent. We hear of the outright chaos of war, with makeshift deputies to absent commanders barking arbitrary orders to conscripted teenagers, as all borders, fronts and realities disintegrated into one inescapable, foggy, desolate nightmare. 

And we hear this tale, remarkably, from the man’s son, a great British actor and writer who knew his father in his final guise: a man who stitched clothes and raised his family politely in a quiet, small Scottish city. A content tailor, hardworking and straightforward, and a father, we discover, who was a gloriously faulty idol: a loving man and a dignified breadwinner who carried a great secret alone to his grave. From the complex and unfathomable inhumanity of conflict we see realised on stage a story, a man, and a family, and all their glories and intrigue.

The qualities of Dogstar Theatre’s production shift quite conspicuously at the halfway mark. What starts as an engaging, well-orchestrated but unspectacular account of Zajac senior’s peaceful postwar life quickly turns into a kind of detective story, as Zajac junior attempts to iron out the disparities in his father’s story and discovers ever more intriguing details of his dad’s life – many of which affect his own.

Rarely have I sat closer to the edge of my seat. Interwoven are letters, photos and video that are at times jaw-droppingly revelatory and intimate. Any instinctive fear of one-man shows, particularly any that elaborate a personal backstory, are entirely dispelled, and not just by the presence of a very fine violinist onstage, but by the images and voices of survivors from the dreadful events that are described – and by an imagined cast of millions on stage besides them.

From among those millions, one man’s story is told: and their collective tragedy becomes somehow more fathomable. 

The Tailor of Inverness was at the University of Bristol’s Wickham Theatre on Tuesday, March 15. For more Wickham Theatre shows, visit www.bristol.ac.uk/theatre/events