The London premiere run of Matthew Zajac’s internationally acclaimed The Tailor of Inverness opens at the multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre for a four-week limited season on Tuesday 14 May and runs until 8 June.
This is a long overdue opportunity for London audiences to see an unforgettable and critically-acclaimed story of displacement and survival in war-torn Europe. A powerful allegory for all victims of war, it is a true story of journeys, of how a boy who grew up on a farm in Galicia (then in Eastern Poland, now in Western Ukraine) came to be a tailor in Inverness…
Mateusz Zajac’s life spanned most of the 20th century. Taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939 and forced to work, he was freed in an amnesty after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and joined the thousands of Poles fighting with the British Army in North Africa and Italy. He was then resettled in Britain in 1948, joining his brother in Glasgow.
That is the story he told….but was the tailor really who he said he was?
Combining storytelling, songs, poetry and physicality with a rich soundscape of live fiddle music and effects, Matthew Zajac’s stunning play about his Polish father has entranced over 40,000 people worldwide, playing in a huge variety of venues in twelve countries, from sold-out runs in prestigious theatres in cities like New York, Adelaide, Malmo, Edinburgh, Brussels, Dublin and Berlin, cities in Ukraine and Poland such as Kyiv, Lublin and Lviv and tiny village halls in the Scottish Highlands. Its many awards include a Scotsman Fringe First, The Stage Best Solo Performer Award and Best Actor at the CATS (Critics Awards for Theatre In Scotland) Awards.
The Tailor of Inverness is part of the Finborough’s Theatre’s #VoicesFromUkraine, a programming strand set up in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
