A few live on, elderly and not much regarded, their time past and a new generation of immigrants paying them little mind. In Banchory on Deeside, there was Uriaz, the local photographer, in Arbroath a taxi service. Up and down the east coast of Scotland, as elsewhere, Poland's former soldiers who couldn't or had no wish to go home made up new lives for themselves.
Dogstar have become one of Scotland's most interesting and inventive theatre companies. Their new production, The Tailor of Inverness, written and performed by Matthew Zajac, follows previous successes. Directed by Ben Harrison with a live score from Jonny Hardie and Gavin Marwick, The Tailor of Inverness traces the life and wanderings of a character closely based on Zajac's own father, who began life in Galicia, then part of Poland, now part of Ukraine, to end in a Scottish coastal town.
The production makes skilful use of projection and sound as well as musical score to re-create a sense of the distances traveled, physically and emotionally by someone caught in the upheavals of World War Two and its aftermath. Zajac pieces a life together from fragments, in the way many of us have done, from the faulty memories of parents and relatives, terse and spare documents, fleeting mentions scattered among weightier narratives. Yet the point surely is, as Zajac implies, that it is only by regarding the individual and personal that we may come to terms with the real impact of great events.
It's hard to gauge the impact of The Tailor if Inverness on both the generations which still remember life in the shadow of World War Two and those to whom it is literally history, but Zajac's performance and this production bring one man's story vividly into focus. If you want to see something of current Scottish theatre at its very best, get thee to the Assembly Rooms and buy a ticket for this diamond sharp wee number.
Time: 14.55
Dates: August 1-25 (not Mondays)
copyright Bill Dunlop August 2008
published on edinburghguide.com August 2008