Tailor of Inverness, The (24 page)

In the years since my first meeting with Irena, my father’s story has had more impact than I could ever have imagined. I now have wonderful new relatives and friends in Mieszkowice, as well as Pidhaitsi, Ternopil and Lviv. I visit them when I can, though not as often as I’d like. Irena and her family have shown me nothing but generosity and love. In addition to this, the success of my play has taken the story into the public realm and the response of the public has been quite
overwhelming
.

I had never intended the play to be in any way fictional – it was written from direct experience, with only a couple of short sequences taking imaginative leaps, based on the stories I’d heard of my father going into hiding and starving in the German POW camp. I didn’t want to create characters I didn’t know, perhaps because I didn’t trust myself to do it
convincingly
. I felt it was appropriate to use the artifice of the play’s construction, without any further fictionalisation. I wanted the fewest possible barriers between the audience and the truth of the story. It seemed clear to me that there should be only two characters, me and him, and that I should play them both. I also didn’t want to be alone on stage. Not because I was
afraid of that, I have done it before, but because I felt the need for richer contextual and emotional possibilities than a lone presence could offer. There had to be music and there had to be a musician. The violin is the quintessential
instrument
of Eastern European and Scottish folk music, so a violinist it was.

The play kind of wrote itself. It has elements contained in this book – my father’s account of his life, my discovery of some of the truth. I already had so much material: the
transcriptions
, the war record, letters and diary entries from my travels. And I read around the subject: Primo Levi, Norman Davies, Anthony Beevor, Orlando Figes; Waldemar Lotnik’s autobiographical account of his young life as a Polish partisan in Volhynia,
Nine Lives
; Kate Brown’s fascinating study of nationality and identity in the region immediately to the east of Galicia during the first two decades after the Russian revolution,
A Biography of No Place
; Joseph Roth’s bittersweet elegy for Austro-Hungary,
The Radetzky March
; Shimon Redlich’s moving and illuminating account of his formerly multi-ethnic Galician town during the inter-war years, which was only 30 kilometres from Gnilowody,
Together and Apart in Brzezany
. I trawled websites and found one on Podhajce’s Jewish past which showed photographs of existing houses and details of former Jewish owners. The extraordinary website
jewishgen.org
contains a chapter for each of the lost
communities
, so there is a Podhajce chapter full of memoirs of survivors. I did write a substantial amount, but a large part of the process was collating and ordering material, giving the story shape and dramatic rhythm. Having spent nearly 20 years to arrive at the point of creation, it didn’t take much more than a week to put the text together.

I met the play’s director, Ben Harrison, in 2006. He was immediately interested in the story. Even though I had met him only once for about 45 minutes, the way he engaged with
it, coupled with his own adventurous work with his company, Grid Iron, told me that he was the right person for the job. With Dogstar regular Jonny Hardie and with Gavin Marwick, I was blessed with two of Scotland’s finest fiddlers. One fiddler would never be enough, as musos always have several irons in the fire, with bands, recording and writing commissions, so we had two in rehearsal. So far, one of them has always been available when needed.

With editorial advice from Ben, a rehearsal draft was ready at the beginning of 2008. We spent a week in March
experimenting
with the script and production ideas. More edits were made and a few elements of the script were re-ordered. At the end of the week, we presented a staged reading of the script, with music, to an invited audience of fourteen people at Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh. It worked, and for the first time, we began to understand that we might have something quite special in our hands. I don’t mean to sound conceited, I’m simply reflecting on how it felt at the time, for us and for those fourteen.

There’s a lot of information to absorb in 75 minutes of the performance. I wanted to use some of the video and stills I had gathered and I felt that the audience would need further illumination through the presentation of maps and the routes of journeys. We also needed the projection of translations of the Polish songs and passages in Polish, Russian, German and Ukrainian. Ben had done some work with the video artist Tim Reid, so he pulled him on board. I had described the setting as a tailor’s workshop, which is where I had recorded my father’s words. Ali Maclaurin designed a set which evoked much more than just the workshop. She created a dream-like playing space of grey, blue and white, with a tapered backdrop of clothing, some of which spilled on to the floorcloth, pressed into it. The texture of the painted clothes played with the video images which were projected on to them. Fabric, and
fabrication, became a central metaphor. The clothes were ever present, powerfully evoking the dead, all those souls who were absent, whose stories were embodied in my father’s story. Kai Fischer’s subtle lighting and Timothy Brinkhurst’s sound design completed the assemblage.

After a couple of preview performances at the Arches Theatre in Glasgow,
The Tailor of Inverness
opened at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the Assembly Rooms. After 5 days, the show was a sell-out. Word-of-mouth can be very powerful at the Fringe. We were awarded a Scotsman Fringe First at the end of the first week. Critics and public alike raved about the show. I was receiving letters and cards on a daily basis from audience members who felt compelled to write. Like me, some were sons or daughters of Poles. One woman told me that I was ‘telling the story of every Polish family’. Another said that for fifty years she had never believed that it would be possible to encapsulate this experience on a stage. The show won two more awards. It was exhilarating, humbling and exhausting. One of our awards took the show to the Adelaide Fringe Festival for a month early in 2009. The Adelaide audience embraced the show in the same way as the Edinburgh one, with many of the city’s Eastern European community attending. I was invited to the Polish club by a marvellous old Ukrainian academic and radio presenter, Myk Mykyta, and Gavin and I were driven to Polish Hill River Museum, the site of the earliest Polish settlement in South Australia, 130 kilometres north of the city.

We toured Scotland twice that year, with most performances sold out. We took the show to Sweden too, playing at the inaugural Skelleftea Storytelling Festival and at Umea University, both in the north of the country. In early summer the Scottish theatre critics named me best actor for my performance in the show. This was flattering, though somewhat ironic when you consider that for half the performance I play myself.

In the autumn of 2010, Dogstar took the play to Poland, Ukraine and Germany. To coincide with our Ukrainian
performances
, the play was translated by Svitlana Shilpchenko and published in the literary magazine
Vsesvit (The Whole World)
. My cousin Ula’s son, Wojtek Wozniak, provided us with an excellent Polish translation and we presented the show on this tour with a complete projected translation for our Ukrainian and Polish audiences.

It seemed right to me to take the story back to its origins, but I was nervous about how it would be received. I was conscious that it could be viewed as a presumptuous act, for a foreigner to have the gall to tell Poles and Ukrainians their own story. But my previous trips to Ukraine in particular had told me that this was a story which had rarely been expressed on a public platform. The shock of the war and the subsequent 45-year Soviet stasis retained their grip. The fear of speaking out which was endemic to the old Stalinist culture meant that many people, particularly in the older generations, still had a policeman in their head.

The show was included in the programmes of two major theatre festivals, Konfrontacje Teatralne (Theatre Confrontations) in Lublin and the Zoloty Lev (Golden Lion) Festival in Lviv. I met the Scottish academic Robert Brown through the Ukrainian Club in Edinburgh. He was involved in charitable work in orphanages in Ukraine and he put me in touch with his Ukrainian colleague Valeriy Fen. Valeriy organised two performances for us at Lutsk University in Volhynia. I also made a speculative phone call to Kyiv Mohyla University and was answered by a secretary who spoke no English. Fortunately, a law student who did speak good English happened to be passing by the secretary’s desk and she turned out to have a passion for theatre. Her name was Oksana Ivantsiv and she became the show’s promoter in Kyiv. I also wanted to present the show in Pidhaitsi, so Lesia arranged a
performance in the town’s social club. I discussed a
presentation
in Mieszkowice with Irena’s family, but they felt that the personal exposure would be too difficult for Irena and Anna. Instead, I arranged a performance with Zielona Gora University, 130 kilometres south of Mieszkowice.

We experienced a comedy of errors and obstruction at the Polish/Ukrainian border, which initially resulted in us being barred from taking our van into Ukraine. This led to us spending the whole night at the border and the organisers of the Golden Lion Festival sending their own van over for us to transfer the essentials of our set and equipment into this van. We eventually arrived in Lviv only five hours before the first performance, having had no sleep. Adrenalin kept us going and the packed audience gave the show a rapturous reception and a standing ovation. The same happened with our second performance the next day. I received several gifts from audience members.

Unfortunately, the delays caused at the border crossing, which continued when we returned to make another attempt to get the van across, caused the cancellation of our Pidhaitsi performance. This was a huge disappointment. For me, it was our most important performance in Ukraine. But the remainder of the tour went well. In Lutsk, a former Polish city, an audience of over 400 was initially quite restless, but it fell silent as I mentioned the Soviets for the first time. I found this quite disturbing. The play is not exactly positive about the role of the Russians and as I performed the show, I wondered if I was offending anyone. If I was, I never heard about it. I think this sudden concentration was another manifestation of the old taboos, that one couldn’t talk openly about such things as the Soviet annexation of Eastern Poland and the Gulag, and here was a Scottish theatre company doing just that. The Lutsk audience gave the show another standing ovation as did all our audiences in Ukraine. A young Jewish student came
up to me afterwards, barely able to talk. He took my hand and mumbled his thanks before darting away. I wanted to have a conversation with him, but I was besieged by other people. Although the play is not directly about the
Shoah
, it was impossible for me to ignore it as a fundamental part of the story. So the vibrant pre-war Jewish culture of Pidhaitsi and the fate of its people are described, including the two little boys who were at school with my father, Lipko and Muinka, represented by two white shirts.

We played for three nights in Kyiv, in a studio theatre at the university. Oksana had worked energetically to generate an audience, with the help of her enthusiastic friends. It was refreshing to meet these intelligent young Ukrainians. We stayed in Podol, a lively, cosmopolitan neighbourhood next to the wide River Dnieper. If you visit Ukraine and stay only in the centre of Kyiv, you might get the impression that Ukraine is much richer than it really is. There are designer shops,
smartly-dressed
urbanites and endless rows of black SUVs with tinted windows parked on the roadsides, the conveyances of members of the oligarchy or of organised crime. We visited Bulgakov’s house and the impressive Great Patriotic War Museum, its exhibition unchanged since the Soviet era, perhaps because it quite justifiably emphasises the enormous scale of human sacrifice which took place.

We had full houses in Lublin and Zielona Gora. These audiences responded warmly, but there were no standing ovations. We travelled to the outskirts of Lublin to take a grim walk through Majdanek, the intact concentration camp, now a museum. We held a discussion after the show in Zielona Gora where one of the university’s professors questioned my even-handed description of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict, asserting that the Ukrainians bore a far greater responsibility for atrocities. Perhaps this explained the more reserved reaction in Poland. But these were still special performances, and there
were numerous expressions of thanks and appreciation. The Zielona Gora performance was particularly special for me as this was the one which was attended by Irena and her family. They had already read a translation of the play and seen a DVD of an earlier performance. They were pleased at the play’s success, but I think they were even more pleased just to see me.

We travelled on to Berlin for a successful week at the English Theatre. German audiences have embraced the play too. Since then, it has been presented in Kiel and Dresden in Germany. Our first US performances took place at the University of Massachusetts in February 2012. We got a standing ovation there too, and we were already looking forward to further touring in Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and the UK during 2013.

A month after the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe, I received an email from a woman called Hela Deacon. Hela lives in the East Midlands. She hadn’t seen the show, but she had read about it after googling Gnilowody with a cousin who was visiting from Poland. She felt she had to contact me because her mother, whose maiden name was Olszewska, had been from the village and her father was from Podhajce. Her Uncle Janek Olszewski and his wife Jozia, both from Gnilowody, were still alive and living in a village called Lezyce, close to Zielona Gora in south-west Poland. She has several other cousins there. She knew of a family of Zajacs in Lezyce too. I recalled a visit to Lesna in the ‘60s from a man called Marion Zajac. He was tall and swarthy, with a gentle demeanour and slicked back hair like my dad’s. I was told he had come from Zielona Gora. Hela explained that ‘As to your sister in Mieszkowice, Marysia (her cousin) said that the Gnilowody village was divided between Lezyce and Mieszkowice, being told that Mieszkowice had more fertile land and was the better option.’ She was referring to the deportation of the Gnilowody Poles by the Soviets at the beginning of 1945, the six-month journey taken by Irena and her mother.