“The Tailor of Inverness”, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Mark Brown in Scotland’s capital
★★★★☆
16 September 2026
It is some 18 years since the remarkable work of theatrical storytelling The Tailor of Inverness first took to the stage (at the Traverse Theatre during the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe). Written and performed by Matthew Zajac (founder and artistic director of Scottish Highlands-based Dogstar Theatre) the piece relates the extraordinary life story of the dramatist’s father, Mateusz Zając.
Photo credit: Tim Morozzo.
Mateusz grew up in an ethnically mixed town (with significant Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish populations) in the Galicia region of what was then eastern Poland (now western Ukraine). The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939 began a war experience that took Mateusz from the Polish Army (defending his homeland) to the Polish forces fighting for the British Army in North Africa and Italy.
His astonishing journey – which included a lengthy period of forced labour in Stalin’s Soviet Union – would bring the demobbed Mateusz to Glasgow (where his brother had already settled). There he married a Scotswoman (“Mary from Maryhill”) and, through his work as a tailor, he raised a family in the Highland capital of Inverness.
There is, embedded in this biography, tremendous emotional anguish and physical privation. Like any life that is woven so intricately into epic and catastrophic circumstances, Mateusz’s story carries the marks of a grand historical narrative.
However, from Galicia to the Scottish Highlands, the Polish soldier’s experience is sewn through the lives of “ordinary” people – loved ones, townsfolk from Mateusz’s pre-war life – who rarely appear as more than numbers in our historiography. It is this aspect – complete with a deeply affecting, morally complex secret – that Matthew Zajac recounts so vividly, both on stage and (courtesy of Scottish publisher Luath Press) in written prose.
Indeed, the stage script is, inevitably, a biographical history told in narrative prose. The storytelling is illuminated by folk tales and various voices (performed by Zajac and recorded, in Polish, by Magdalena Kaleta).
In a production that is intelligently wrought by director Ben Harrison (who is best known as artistic director of Scottish theatre company Grid Iron), the piece is also enhanced by projected maps, photographs and videos. The performance is accompanied by a live musical score (played on this tour by the alternating violinists Gavin Marwick and Jonny Hardie) that includes both Polish and Scottish folk tunes.
Drawing upon the theme of tailoring, Harrison’s production enables Zajac to switch between diverse characters – a Polish soldier, a Nazi officer, Jewish boys who would soon be murdered in the Holocaust – by means of the very simple device of a clothing rack on wheels that carries a few jackets on hangers. Simply choreographed, but effective, movement adds life to the narrative, as does the typically sensitive lighting by Kai Fischer.
Presented by Dogstar – a company that sits alongside this show as the great achievement of Zajac’s career – and performed with a personal passion, The Tailor of Inverness remains as captivating and as moving an indictment of the human cost of war as it was when it premiered 18 years ago.
Touring throughout Scotland, 21 October to 17 November: dogstartheatre.co.uk
