theatreSCOTLAND

5 August 2008 Northings

The Tailor of Inverness

By Matthew Zajac. Dogstar review.

MATTHEW Zajac's father used to tell a story about how to catch a fox. The method is to get the creature in the open then circle it. As long as you complete the circle, the fox will stay grounded. Then you spiral inwards and take your prey. Zajac does something similar to his father. In The Tailor of Inverness (or Krawiec z Inverness), the writer and actor slowly closes in on the Polish-born Zajac senior, giving him enough space to tell his life story in his own way, but not so much room that the old man escapes, fox-like, with his distortions, evasions and rewriting of history.

29 May 2007 The Guardian

'e Polish Quine

By Henry Adam. Dogstar review.

LAST week in the Bank of Scotland Children's International Theatre Festival, the multinational NIE company presented The End of Everything Ever, a heart-breaking play about kindertransport and Nazi persecution. It told the story of a Jewish girl who was compelled to flee Berlin for London, and who later returned to find her home destroyed and her family gone.

10 May 2006 The Guardian

The Seer

By Ali Smith. Dogstar review.

THE Accidental, Ali Smith's much-lauded novel, is about the effect on a middle-class family of the mysterious Amber. Enigmatic, inconsistent and appearing out of nowhere, she is the figure by which the others come to define themselves. In her debut play, given its premiere by the small Dogstar company, Smith plays with the same idea twice over. First is the arrival of the much travelled Kirsty, whose identity is uncertain, though she is clearly not the person she says she is. Simply showing up in the living room of Iona and Neil is enough to upset their bourgeois equilibrium.

theatreSCOTLAND © Mark Fisher 2009