Review: The Bespoke Overcoat - The Jewish Chronicle

As Morry might say: "Never mind the length, feel the quality."
This 1956 gem by Wolf Mankowitz, about the friendship between Morry the tailor and Fender the shipping clerk, may only be 50 minutes long, but oy, what a 50 minutes.

The tale started life as a Nikolai Gogol short story, which Mankowitz turned into a play, an Oscar-winning film and relocated from St Petersburg to the Jewish East End, where he was born.

Suitably enough for a work about poverty and exploitation, there is a Dickensian feel to Ninon Jerome's production which, with Pnina Gary's An Israeli Love Story, forms part of the London Jewish Performing Arts Festival.

Strangely, there is no set design credit in the programme. But if "scenic artist" Helen Atherton conceived the production's look, rather than just painted it, she deserves credit for wittily outlining the East End building in which Morry lives and works with the white dotted lines of a tailor's cutting instructions.

The twinkle-eyed George Layton and a gaunt David Graham take on the roles played by David Kossoff and Alfie Bass in the film - the warm-hearted Morry and the freezing-cold Fender.

In terms of plot, the play - told in flashback by the brandy-swigging Morry and Fender's ghost - is as thin as a mackintosh without a lining. Fender needs a coat and can't afford one. We get a bit of back story, too.

For 40 years Fender worked in the same cold warehouse. His boss is Ranting (James Barron) who was once the boss's son and who Fender remembers as a boy whose socks needed pulling up. Now the boy is a bully who can tell a hypothermic old man to count coats while refusing him one to wear.

So Fender takes his current threadbare garment back to Morry who made it for him two decades earlier. And instead of mending it, Morry supplies a new one at cost, or would have if only Fender had not been fired and died before it was completed.

It is not so much plot that counts here as character - character and a resigned Russian attitude to suffering which Mankowitz informs with the gentlest of Jewish humanitarianism.

Layton and Graham make a charismatic double act. Graham in particular is outstanding. His Fender is falling apart at the seams. He is a painfully fragile, scrawny wretch who in death seeks the justice that was denied him in life. He wants one of Ranting's coats. And around this simple tale, Mankowitz weaves a thread of wry wisdom.

"I tell you a secret, Morry," says the dead Fender, pointing in the opposite direction to heaven. "Everybody goes down there."

In the interests of disclosure I should add that the London Jewish Performing Arts Festival is sponsored by the JC. Not that that wouldn't stop me warning readers to spend their money elsewhere, something I have had to do too often at the New End, where the Jewishness of the material is often more important than the quality. But not this time. Here the material envelopes you in pathos as completely as one of Morry's hand-made cashmere coats.

If I have a gripe, it is that Jerome deploys distracting train-like sound effects to separate the scenes, the significance of which is difficult to fathom.

And the schmaltzy violin accompanying Morry's kaddish for Fender is also misjudged. Kaddish needs no accompaniment. It is like adding a saxophone to a bugle sounding The Last Post.