MATTHEW ZAJAC celebrates the return of his Fringe hit and hopes that Dogstar Theatre’s new production will follow suit

MATTHEW ZAJAC scored a huge success at the Edinburgh Fringe two years ago with his own The Tailor of Inverness, and is now hoping that Dogstar Theatre can do the same again with the company’s latest offering, Caithness-born writer Henry Adam’s Jacobite Country.

Matthew Zajac in The Tailor of Inverness

Zajac is directing Adam’s play, which will premiere at Eden Court Theatre this week before both shows play back-to-back in Edinburgh. Jacobite Country will then embark on a tour in the Highlands in September, while The Tailor of Inverness will be seen again at Eden Court prior to a European tour that will include a performance in Zajac’s father’s home town in the Ukraine.

Jacobite Country is the second play by Henry Adam which the company have premiered, but I suggested that it sounds very different in style to ‘E Polish Quine.

Sounds very different to the first one – style?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: We’ll, it’s a kind of surreal comedy about the Highlands, and by extension about Scotland. It’s a play that plays around with reality and sanity, and provokes the odd instances of questioning what is real and what is unreal in the play, what is sane what is insane.

Jacobite Country - Laurence Winram

That is largely signalled to the audience through the fact that the first half of the play is set in Craig Dunain psychiatric hospital, as was. It’s a contemporary play that could be set anytime in the last ten or fifteen years, maybe. I know Craig Dunain actually closed in 1996, but we have taken a bit of an artistic liberty with it if you like.

In the folk memory of the Highlands it is a place that looms very large – I grew up looking at it every morning of my life when I was a boy living in Dalneigh. It was notorious across the Highlands as a place to be feared, and that is reflected to a degree in the play. We are not trying to realistically convey what Craig Dunain was like or the kind of things that happened there – in a way it is used as a kind of metaphor for a certain condition that Henry certainly feels he can identify through his own experience of growing up in the Highlands and his life in Scotland.

Jacobite Country by Henry Adam (Picture - Paul Campbell)

NORTHINGS: Hmmm – so it’s the Highlands as a madhouse?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: Ha! It’s certainly a play about a bunch of raj bampots from the Highlands! It’s a play that is about Scottish identity, and there is an awful lot of navel gazing goes on in Scotland about who we are and where we sit in the world, and this play is another piece that contributes to that. It’s quite provocative, because it’s dealing with things like Scotland’s relationship with England and questions to do with self-determination, and it uses the idea of psychiatric illness as a metaphor for the inability of the Scots to be at peace with themselves, if you like.

NORTHINGS: I mentioned that this seems very different to the previous play you did with Henry Adam, but that is actually true of most of his work, isn’t it?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: Definitely. I think he is one of the best and most interesting playwrights in Scotland, and if you look at his work it is very versatile – they are all different. He’s written a realistic play about heroin addiction in Caithness, he’s written a knockabout farce about terrorism set in a council estate in London, he’s written an almost grotesque and quite sexually violent play about the Middle East, and he’s written a poetic and quite gentle but powerful play set on a farm in Aberdeenshire after the war, and now we have this strange dream of a play, very funny in places but with serious things to say.

Jacobite Country by Henry Adam (Picture - Paul Campbell)

NORTHINGS: Tell me about the way in which you have chosen to cast this play, which looks a bit unusual?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: There are three female characters and four male characters in the play, and I’ve chosen an all-female cast of four actresses, Sarah Haworth, Fiona Morrison, Mairi Morrison and Annie Grace, so we have women playing men. It’s not so common these days to have a single gender cast for mixed-gender roles, and when it happens it tends to be the other way around – it’s more common to have all male casts.

Every so often someone decides to emulate the days of Elizabethan theatre when there were no women on stage, for example, but it is quite rare to have an all-female cast with women playing men. There are a number of reasons why I chose to do that.

The two central male characters, Craitur Face and Haggis McSporran, who is a stand-up comedian, both have some stereotypical macho attitudes at times, and I thought it would be quite interesting to have women in a position where they were portraying that, because it would instantly undermine it. There are far more parts generally for men in acting, and there are a number of very talented women actors from the Highlands that I have come across in recent years, and I felt it would be nice to redress the balance in a small way.

NORTHINGS: And is that working out as you hoped at this stage [during the rehearsal process]?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: Yes, very much so. They are a great cast, and they are really enjoying it – it’s an interesting challenge for them as well, and they all have lots to do in the play. Annie Grace’s character, Uncle Angus, spends most of the play in a catatonic coma, but she is pretty busy anyway because she is playing Border pipes and whistles through the show.

Jacobite Country by Henry Adam (Picture - Paul Campbell)

NORTHINGS: Is there more live music?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: Annie is the sole musician. Sarah and Fiona both play instruments, but they have enough to do, so we left it at that.

NORTHINGS: Why did you want live music?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: We have live music and also some old Scottish step dance in the show. Both are intrinsically Scottish. Traditional step dance pretty much died out in Scotland, and there was really none until maybe 20 years ago, when it was consciously revived. It’s another metaphor for Scottishness and national identify. The show will begin with a traditional step dance by three of the characters, but as the play goes on it gets increasingly messed around with. The music is probably going to be traditional, but we are still working on it, and Annie may come up with something new for it as well.

NORTHINGS: And you are working with a Swedish designer, Ulla Karlsson, on the set?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: Ulla is a fantastic Swedish designer from Profitheatren in northern Sweden, among others, and has won awards there for her work. I’ve been lucky enough to do a bit of work over there myself, initially through an exchange we did with Highland companies and our counterparts over there.

We spent a few days with each other in Ullapool and over there, and a couple of years later I got a job on an English-speaking production in Sweden. Through all of that I got to know her. We are hoping to do a co-production with a Swedish company next year if we can raise the finance – the Scottish Arts Council have just turned us down. It may still happen, and if so, Ulla will design that as well.

She has done a fantastic job on this one. The main locations are Craig Dunain, on the London comedy circuit, and a croft on the side of Loch Ness, so the set has to serve as all those places. It is kind of expressionistic in a way, and suggests all of these places and the landscape and so on, but it is not a realistic set.

NORTHINGS: And will that apply to the costumes as well?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: The characters are a bit larger than life, and the costumes reflect that as well – the designer has been buying ordinary clothes for the show, but they will then be treating them in various ways to reflect that air of surreality and particular colour schemes for the characters.

NORTHINGS: It all sounds as if it is going to be, ummm, quite vivid?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: I think it will be vivid, yes. It will be hard to ignore it. How it will be received we’ll wait and see. I have no idea, to be honest. There are lots of entertaining elements in it, and it is also quite provoking, so we hope people will come and see it and have a good time when they do.

NORTHINGS: Where are you performing in Edinburgh this time?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: We are at the Cow Barn, which is the Reid Concert Hall at Edinburgh University, which becomes part of the Underbelly’s stable of venues during the Fringe. It’s a nice venue when they do it up, and the show is on back-to-back with The Tailor of Inverness.

NORTHINGS: You’ll be hoping for a repeat of the success of Tailor.

MATTHEW ZAJAC: It would be hard to repeat that, I think, but we are hoping it will do well.

NORTHINGS: And what lies beyond the two tours at this stage?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: We have a new show in development for early next year, an adaptation of a Swedish novel which Kevin McNeil is doing for us, and we have the funds for that. Beyond that, I haven’t a clue what is going to happen. It is such had work keeping the company going, and it’s not going to get any easier any time soon. We spent a lot of time doing a batch of applications to the SAC just before we started work on this show, and the assessments couldn’t have been more positive, but they still turned us down for all of them.

NORTHINGS: Did they provide funding for Jacobite Country?

MATTHEW ZAJAC: Yes, we had a project grant from the SAC which was initially just for a Scottish tour, so we are stretching that out to do the Fringe as well. So it’s probably about twice as many performances from the money. But it does mean more risk involved – we have to get a certain percentage of the box office in Edinburgh.

NORTHINGS: Good luck with both shows, then.

Jacobite Country is at the OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, from 28-31 July 2010.

Jacobite Country and The Tailor of Inverness are at the Cow Barn, Bristo Square, Edinburgh, on various dates form 5-29 August 2010.

Jacobite Country is on tour in Scotland in September 2010.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2010

Links

• Dogstar Theatre