Theatre

New Scottish tour for Dogstar’s The Tailor of Inverness could help fund future projects

by Margaret Chrystall

As Dogstar Theatre Company’s most successful play opens in Ullapool on Saturday – its latest tour across Scotland for the first time in seven years – artistic director Matthew Zajac looks back at the incredible story of The Tailor of Inverness.

Since Matthew wrote it after researching the story of his late father Mateusz’s Second World War, the multi award-winning play has been seen by over 40,000 people in more than 300 performances across the world – in countries including Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Ukraine, USA and Australia.

After the play was performed in 2008, Matthew wrote a book too with the same title published in 2013 with former local publisher Sandstone Press. This month, it is being republished by Luath Press with a new epilogue by the writer. It updates the story and his own experiences as events unfolded.

Looking at the reasons The Tailor Of Inverness returns now, Matthew said: “To be honest, the show is probably more relevant now than it was when I first started doing it, particularly with what’s happened in Ukraine.”

Dogstar – which is a European touring theatre company based in the Highlands that commissions, produces and tours new plays by writers from the north of Scotland and elsewhere – has had a success on its hands with the play since the moment it opened at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008.

In its first week, the play directed by acclaimed Grid Iron director Ben Harrison, had sold out and won a Fringe First award, later two other awards too. And in 2009 the Scottish critics’ awards CATS, saw Matthew – who appears as his father and himself in the play – win the best actor category for his Tailor performance.

The play also features a fiddle-player at its heart, appearing alongside Matthew onstage. The score is from two of Scotland’s finest traditional fiddlers, Jonny Hardie and Gavin Marwick, who have appeared in the show and, since the start, fellow top fiddle-players Aidan O’Rourke and Amy Geddes have appeared at various times and locations too. Set and costume design is by Ali Maclaurin, with lighting design by Kai Fischer and sound design by Timothy Brinkhurst. In 2020, the documentary film Circling The Fox by Brian Ross and Hopscotch Films, appeared on BBC Scotland TV as well as in a special showing at Eden Court in Inverness, telling the story of the play and Matthew’s journey into his father’s past.

Over the Dogstar Theatre Company’s life so far, it has presented performances everywhere from village halls to city centre theatres, has featured international as well as North writers, such as Goerge Gunn, Kevin MacNeil and Ali Smith, as well as local actors, theatre-makers, musicians and rising young North talents. And as well as performing at locations from Tehran to New York, it has developed co-productions and worked on different projects with international partners, including Sweden and Denmark.

Subjects relevant to the Highlands – but also the rest of the world – have included Factor 9, an account of the infected blood scandal which saw it perform an extract from the play written by former Dogstar joint artistic director Hamish MacDonald in the Scottish Parliament. In 2017, The Sky Is Safe took the Syrian refugee crisis from Istanbul to Scotland. Matthews interviews in the Turkish capital with female Syrian refugees – funded via Creative Scotland and the Scottish Government’s Creative Theatre Fund -formed the basis for the play which looked at a Scots/Syrian relationship that expressed the West’s moral frailty and the damage war leaves behind.

Just before rehearsals this week for The Tailor of Inverness’s return, Matthew talked about why it is time to take the play on the road again.

“We haven’t toured The Tailor of Inverness in Scotland since 2019,” he said.

“We did three performances at the Traverse [in Edinburgh in 2024] but every time we’ve toured it, we’ve filled most of the venues that we’ve played in.

“And I was aware that there appeared to still be quite a lot of demand for the show.”

In some ways, despite all the success, the impact of the play still surprises Matthew.

“It seems to have been something of a phenomenon. I’ve never really done a show like this that’s had such demand and such a consistent response from audiences.

“It’s pretty rare to have a show which has such a powerful impact on audiences, and it’s the audiences that really keep me going with the show, you know,” he said.

“If we were getting dribs and drabs of people, and they were a bit indifferent to it, then, you know, the show would have died a long time ago.

“But they’re not. And although about 40,000 people have seen it to date, there are still plenty of people who haven’t.

“There are new audiences coming through all the time – and that’s why we keep doing it, really.”

After seeing the play, audience members have previously commented things like – “One of the most moving theatre experiences we’ve ever had.”  David Getz, New York.

And “This is the story of every Polish family.”   Joanna Jankowska, Edinburgh.

The critics recognised the play’s quality – “Compelling, impassioned” New York Times.

And the Sunday Independent called it “A towering piece of work”, while UK theatre’s custom publication The Stage called the play “A timeless tribute to the children of war”.

But the struggle the company has had to secure core funding from Creative Scotland to keep Dogstar going and creating new productions without a hand to mouth existence, is ongoing. In 2015 joint artistic director and founder Hamish MacDonald resigned from the company due to funding setbacks.

Matthew said: “The only other reason for the tour is a sort of secondary reason, but quite important for Dogstar, in that it’s proving increasingly difficult for us to be successful with grant applications to produce new shows.

“We’ve only produced three new shows since 2019 and one of them had a very short peripheral tour of the Highlands and Islands in 2024 – The Fallen Angels of The Moine by George Gunn. The second one was Nightlands which we only did for a couple of weeks at the Fringe in 2022 and that didn’t tour.

“And the other one was The Testament of Gideon Mack [adapted by Matthew from writer James Robertson’s novel], which was a sort of mid-scale tour. So we’ve done very, very little, Scotland-wide touring over the last few years, and The Tailor of Inverness is the only show that we can do, I hope, without a subsidy.”

Though Creative Scotland funded the Scottish tour of The Testament of Gideon Mack last year and George Gunn’s play performances, Dogstar noted at the back of the Gideon Mack programme that the government agency had failed to award the three-year core funding the company had hoped for last January. Dogstar also noted it was the fifth time they had applied unsuccessfully for the funding in the last 18 years.

But on the eve of the new tour, Matthew said: “We’re reliant on some substantial box office returns which I think we’ll get.

“After Ullapool on Saturday, we’re doing two shows at The Lyceum in Edinburgh on Monday and Tuesday next week

“That’s selling really well. I mean it looks like it might sell out and that would essentially subsidise quite a lot of our smaller shows.”

The play was Inspired by the life of Matthew’s father, and it is a story of journeys. From his boyhood on a farm in Eastern Poland – now Western Ukraine – who lived through the huge upheavals of the Second World War, the play takes audiences to his dad finally settling as a tailor in Inverness and Matthew’s discoveries later.

Settling in a new country and for Mateusz, settling into Highland life after the war, starting a new life was a shared experience with thousands of Poles after the Second World War. Many were forced to travel extensively and fight throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Soviet Union.

But as Matthew discovered after his dad’s death, his dad’s story was not straightforward and his identity was much more complicated than his son first knew.

Over nearly 20 years of research, Matthew uncovered the full story.

In his new epilogue, Matthew writes of the play that followed: “It took 20 years to arrive at the point of creation. It didn’t take much more than a week to put together the text.”

It seems incredibly fast, but Matthew points out that some of the documents and letters, diary entries and an edited version of his father’s British Army record are included in the play.

“What I did when I was writing the play was more to do with looking at all the material I already had and trying to create a kind of structure for it.

“There are some original passages of writing, but not that many, actually. Everything that my father says in the play are his own words – nearly everything. There are two imagined sequences. But I was trying to be as faithful as I could to the truth, certainly my father’s account and the things that I discovered. It didn’t seem to me that that required much in the way of embellishment.”

As a soldier during part of his war, Matthew as Mateusz Zajac in a dramatic moment from the play. Picture: Tim Morozzo

The revelations unfolding in the play, impacted on Matthew’s own life.

“All these relatives I never knew – 46!” he writes in the epilogue, introducing many people who were related that he has since met through visiting his father’s home region.

“I’d always thought that I was from quite a small family, but actually it is quite a bit bigger now! One of my grandmothers had seven siblings, so there are all sorts of cousins in Ukraine I don’t even know about that I’ve never met. I mean, there are a few I know. And there’s one family that I keep in fairly regular contact with and I visited a couple of times when I’ve been over there with Jeeps For Peace.”

Matthew has driven to Western Ukraine five times since 2022 in a convoy with the voluntary group and will be going back at the end of this month, he says.

He laughed: “It’s fortunate that I like driving! It’s a lot of driving from Edinburgh to Western Ukraine over four days, but it’s very rewarding because, you know, you feel like you’re actually making a difference.

“These vehicles we take are sent to the front to transport wounded and take ammunition and supplies.

“They tend to have quite a short lifespan at the front, because it’s so dangerous.

“I’m told that, on average, each of these vehicles saves 50 lives, so that means a lot.

“The Ukrainians are always extremely grateful when we go there.

“But of course, I always say to them ‘It’s us who need to be thanking you because you are essentially defending us!’. It’s so little compared with what they do.”

Matthew has also produced a series of shows bringing Ukrainian and Scottish artists together on Scottish city stages to raise money for Ukraine.

“I just sort of felt compelled to do it, I suppose,” he explained.

“There’s a poet called Jim McIntosh, who lives near Perth, and he had put a concert on for Ukraine in, I think, April or May 2022, not long after the full-scale invasion.

“That inspired me a bit.

“And then, Alan Mackinnon, ‘Dinner’ [the in-demand international touring soundman from Inverness], he was quite keen to put something on at Eden Court [With Love To Ukraine], and I can’t remember if he approached me or I approached him – I think he might have approached me.

“Anyway, the two of us put that one together, the one in Inverness, and that gave me the experience of doing it.

“I was already involved with the Ukrainian club in Edinburgh and a couple of them had come up to see the Inverness show, and then they asked me to put a similar concert at the Usher Hall in February 2023 to mark the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion, and that was sold out.

“Then the Glasgow Ukrainian organisation asked me to do one there. “Then the Ukrainian club in Edinburgh asked me to do another one for the third anniversary!

“So, you know, I was asked, and, I’ve got quite a lot of contacts with musicians in Scotland and had learned about various Ukrainian artists who were here, who were refugees, so I was able to do it!” he laughed.

Matthew Zajac won the Scottish Critics’ Award for Theatre’s best actor in 2009. Picture: Tim Morozzo

Matthew sets the scene in his epilogue for Dogstar taking The Tailor of Inverness to Ukraine in 2013, including Kyiv and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s birthplace Kryvi Rih. The country’s then president was preparing to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union, a precursor to Ukraine joining the European Union. Matthew recalls posters and ribbons and campaigners handing out leaflets supporting the move. But the Ukrainian president of the time, Viktor Yanukovich refused to sign in the end. Russia annexed Crimea the following year and “the frozen conflict” only ended with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 2022.

Matthew’s epilogue continues: “Ukraine has been forced to channel its brilliant energy into its defence … As I write, the war continues. Putin’s planned 10-day operation to conquer Ukraine is now in its fifth year.”

The tour opens in Ullapool’s Macphail Centre on Saturday (Sept 5).

Matthew said: “We had a very good night in Ullapool with Fallen Angels of The Moine a couple of years ago, where we opened the show there, and 150 people turned up!”

The tour then continues after The Lyceum dates in Edinburgh on Monday and Tuesday (Sep 7 and 8) through October and November across Scotland and includes two nights at Eden Court in Inverness on Wednesday and Thursday, November 11 and 12. It also heads to Findhorn (Oct 21), Portgordon Village Hall (Nov 13), Rosehall Village Hall (Nov 14) and Aboyne-Dinnet Parish Hall (Nov 17).

The Tailor of Inverness seems to open on a very different world now in 2026 to that of its premiere in 2008. Wars are present every day on the news.

Matthew said: “Because the public in Scotland and the rest of the UK is much more aware of Ukraine now, and the issues that it faces, I think we have more interest, and in the history of Ukraine – and that part of the world. Obviously the show involves Poland quite significantly, too.

“But although the play is a historical story from the Second World War, the reason I made it public in the first place was because, for me, it’s just a story of what war does to ordinary people and families, and it doesn’t really matter what war you are talking about, it has a similar impact.”

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The Tailor of Inverness book written by Matthew is being republished this month with the writer’s new epilogue. Check here for details: https://luath.co.uk/products/tailor-of-inverness 

Go to Dogstar’s website for the full tour dates and box office links: Dogstar Theatre Company – European Touring Theatre Company

Find Dogstar on social media: @dogstar