Taking the Plunge

MATTHEW ZAJAC is the co-director of Dogstar Theatre, and directs their new production of Caithness-born writer Henry Adam’s latest play, ‘E Polish Quine. Matthew talks to Northings about the new work, and his career in theatre
 

NORTHINGS: Matthew, Dogstar broke new ground for the company last year with Ali Smith’s ‘The Seer’, which was the first show not written by your co-director, Hamish MacDonald [see Associated Pages below]. Now you are working with Henry Adam – tell us about ‘E Polish Quine.

MATTHEW ZAJAC: We decided a while back that we wanted to work with some other Highland writers, and there aren’t droves of very good playwrights from the Highlands out there. Henry is a top class dramatist, and was an obvious candidate to look at, so it was an easy decision to arrive at.

At the time I approached him he was quite heavily committed with commissions for new work, but this play was actually based on one he had written 14 years ago for an amateur production in Aberdeen, and he was very, very keen to revisit it. He felt it still had great value, but needed a radical overhaul. I read the original and was very happy to go along with that idea.

N: Can you tell us a bit about the play itself?

MZ: At heart it is really a tragedy about the darkness, or the capacity for darkness, within every human being. It has its moments of humour, but I think if it works in the way I think it can work, it will have a cathartic effect on its audience in the way that classic tragedy does.

In terms of learning about how the theatre world worked, it was really just a case of plunging in. There was lots of error as well as trial, but I was very lucky the way things worked out early on

N: When is it set?

MZ: It is set on a farm in Aberdeenshire in 1946, and is about a young man, David Gordon (Fraser Sivewright), who has come back from the war traumatised by what he has seen, and in particular the liberation of the concentration camps.

He has looked after a Polish girl over there for a while, but the Polish quine in the title can apply to two people – one is that girl, who never appears, and the other is Anna (Magdalena Kaleta), the daughter of a family of Polish refugees that David gets involved with, against a backdrop of local antipathy when the Polish family get the lease of a farm that his new brother-in-law had his eye on.

It is wonderfully poetic, and full of the Doric. It’s funny, actually, because in some ways the Polish girl, Anna, will be most comprehensible character for many people, because she is speaking English! I think it is an exceptionally good new play, and our responsibility is to do it justice.
 
N: Although it has a historical setting, would it be a fair guess to suggest it has contemporary resonances?

MZ: Definitely, and in several ways, if you look at the influx of Polish people in Scotland today, and issues like the effects of war. It’s a kind of universal story, if you like, rather than one tied only to its period. I think sometimes having a certain amount of historical distance can be useful – I remember being involved in a play about the situation in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and a number of people felt that it had been almost voyeuristic in dealing so directly with that material.

N: You have a cast of six, one more than “The Seer”, which is a new record for Dogstar, I believe?

MZ: Yes, it’s our biggest ever, and probably on the kind of grants we can get that is about the maximum we could manage without cutting back heavily on the tours, which we definitely don’t want to do. We want to get out to as many audiences around the country as possible.

N: You have a Polish actress in the lead role – how did you find Magdalena?

MZ: It seemed obvious to me with so many Poles in Scotland, there were bound to be actors among them. I contacted a Polish employment agency in Edinburgh, and they sent me CVs of a couple of actresses. Both were excellent, but Magdalena seemed most suited to the role.

She came here three years ago to work and met a man and fell in love, and they had a baby. She has been looking after their wee girl full-time until now, but had decided to see if she could get back to doing some acting work. She has done some very substantial roles in Poland, but this is the first one she has done in English. She is a bit nervous about it all, but it is working out superbly.

It is very much an ensemble piece, and we are very pleased with the casting. Apart from Magdalena and Fraser, we have Kate Howarth and Douglas Russell back from “The Seer”, and Anne Kidd and Hamish Wilson are very good and experienced actors, so it’s not only our biggest cast, but a strong one.

N: How did you come to join Dogstar?

MZ: I’ve known Hamish for years, and I first got involved with Dogstar when he asked me to direct the original production of his play “Seven Ages of Man”. He then went down to Dumfries & Galloway, and I can’t remember exactly how it came about, but it seemed natural to continue working together. He is currently finishing a novel with a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council, so he hasn’t been taking a major part in this production.

Aside from the vision he had in getting the company started, he is also very responsible with money and so on, and knows how to run the company properly. I’m maybe a bit more flamboyant, so we probably balance each other. He is also very steeped in Scottish literature and culture, while my own expertise is more in performing and producing theatre, so again we balance each other.

N: Did you drive the decision to broaden out beyond Hamish’s own work?

MZ: It was pretty much a joint decision, I don’t think it was something that I was pushing. Hamish never really intended the company to be a vehicle exclusively for his work, and when you start a company you really don’t know where it is going to go.
 If you are going to get recognition from funding bodies, though, you have to present them with a strategy and some kind of raison d’être, and it seemed a logical step to look at promoting the work of other Highland writers. I’ve been mainly responsible for making that happen, largely due to Hamish’s other commitments, but it would have happened anyway, I think.

N: You were born and grew up in Inverness – at what point did you get seriously interested in theatre?

MZ: There are always numerous reasons why people end up being actors, but I think the thing that really pushed me in that direction was a production of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ that we did at Inverness High School in 1976, when I was 17.

If you can get a group of adolescent girls that get under the skin of the girls in ‘The Crucible’ it can be electrifying, and that’s what happened. The boys were pretty good as well, to be fair, but it was a very powerful experience watching the girls. It was such an exciting thing to do.

We had a great teacher who ran the drama club. He was German teacher, in fact, and as you know, there is only one drama teacher in the Highlands to this day. His name was Ian Hunter, and he was very inspiring. He had a great commitment to drama. The following year we did ‘Juno and the Paycock’ at Eden Court, which was brand new then.

That was really the experience that tipped me over into drama, although my parents had always been quite keen in encouraging me to show off playing the piano and dancing and all kind of things. My granny lived in a tenement flat in Glasgow that had a curtained-off bed recess in the kitchen, and when I was a wee boy me and my brother and sister used it like a miniature theatre, and put on wee shows for my mum and granny and auntie.

N: Did they expect you to make a career of it?

MZ: I think they had the law or medicine in mind for me, because I was good academically at school, and they were certainly keen that I go on to do a degree, and I was too. I was a bit clueless about drama, to be honest, and I wanted to study it. At that time the only place in Scotland offering it was Glasgow, and even there you couldn’t do an honours drama course, which was what I really wanted.

It turned out there were only six places you could do that in the UK, and I was advised Bristol was the best, so I applied. I went down very naively assuming I’d just get in, not realising that there was huge competition for the places. But I was lucky enough to get in, and did a three year degree there. I could have gone on to a postgraduate degree, but by that time I was anxious to get out and get involved in the drama world, although I didn’t have much idea of how to go about it.

I didn’t know how to get an Equity card, for example. In those days it was a closed shop, and in fact the way I got it was by starting up a company with my girlfriend at the time doing puppet shows round childrens’ homes and fêtés and that kind of thing, and I got my card through that.

In terms of learning about how the theatre world worked, it was really just a case of plunging in. There was lots of error as well as trial, but I was very lucky the way things worked out early on.

N: What was the next step for you?

MZ: The girl I just mentioned got a job with a theatre education company in Bristol as a designer, and they took me on to stage-manage a community play with about 250 actors. It was a re-enactment of the French Revolution in a ruined church in the middle of Bristol, and I also got to play the part of the executioner, which was great fun.

Amazingly, they then offered me a job as an actor, and I did that for a year until their funding was cut – it was a left-wing co-operative theatre company, and the big political theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s had petered out a bit in the Thatcher era – coming out of university as a zealous leftie in 1981 was pretty bad timing!

N: So you were out of a job?

MZ: Yes, but not for long. I was lucky enough to get another job very quickly, with the Half Moon Young People’s Theatre in London, so I was very lucky to have walked straight into two permanent jobs for actors, given that they are practically non-existent. I could have been there to this day, because they are one of the few companies that have survived all this time.

There were some nasty internal politics going on within the company at that point, though, and I eventually felt there was too much of that and not enough theatre going on, so I got myself an agent and became a jobbing actor. I worked in rep, and got the odd bit of TV and film work.

N: This must be around the time of the Faultline Festival in Inverness that Hamish was also involved in?

MZ: Yes, that was 1986, I think. I got together with some of my pals in Inverness, doing a satirical sketch show with Hamish and Martin Campbell in a show called “The Kilt is Our Demise”, which we did for several years.

One of the great things about my course at Bristol was that it gave me a very strong grounding in what theatre was for, and in the philosophy and history of theatre, and I was always very keen on the idea of creating new work.

I was also able to get a new company together with some fellow graduates from Bristol, Plain Clothes Productions. We did six shows between 1990 and 1997, mostly with strong political and philosophical themes, and won some awards, including the prestigious George Devine Award in 1991 for James Stock’s ‘Blue Night in the Heart of the West’.

We made a bit of a splash with that company, and I was also touring as an actor and doing bits and pieces of TV and film, and having the odd false dawn playing the lottery of trying to make it big as an actor. I came close a couple of times, but to be honest, fame is not why I’m in this business, and the kind of work I do with Dogstar is much more significant to me.

N: You were also associated with Grey Coast Theatre in Caithness at one point?

MZ: That was simultaneous with Plain Clothes. I acted in their first production, ‘Songs of the Grey Coast’, and I directed a community play which George Gunn wrote in Helmsdale called ‘The Great Bunillidh Volcano’, which was actually one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done.

We put it all together in about three weeks or something, with a cast of 70 adults and children, with a lot more people in the village involved in other ways. We did it in various locations around Helmsdale, and it worked a treat. I worked quite closely with George Gunn and Grey Coast for a few years – I produced ‘The Niss’, and also produced and directed a wonderful two-hander called ‘Camster’, with Meg Fraser. And I became very well versed in writing grant applications!

N: Did you ever look at a career in directing rather than acting?

MZ: I never hawked myself around for work as a director, no, and when I have done it, it has always been with companies I have an involvement with.

N: Finally, Matthew, was there a conscious decision to come back and work in the Highlands?

MZ: I think I made that decision in 1985 when Faultline got going. The professional theatre culture in the Highlands is a relatively recent development, maybe only in the last 20 years, but now there are people like ourselves and George Gunn and Alasdair McCrone at Mull Theatre, Simon MacKenzie at TOSG, John McGeoch and his team at Arts In Motion, all trying to create theatre in the Highlands, and it is growing.

(‘E Polish Quine premieres at Lyth Arts Centre, Caithness, on 16 May 2007, and tours throughout Scotland until late June 2007 – see Dogstar website for full tour dates)

© Kenny Mathieson, 2007

Links

• Dogstar Theatre