The Cutting of the Cloth by Michael Hastings is too Good for a DS9 Reference

“SPIJAK: [The] art of a perfectly made suit is that you don’t notice it at all because it’s so well made, it fits so natural, there’s no cause to ask yourself if this twit is badly dressed or not. When a good suit is a good piece of making it’s so good it’s invisible. And that’s craft, boy.” (23).


That Craft applies to making plays as well as making suits: the skilled playwright makes a story that, no matter who embodies it, appears seamless. Even on the page, the dialogue of Michael Hastings’ 1973 play The Cutting of the Cloth is clever but unpretentious, and each character’s way of speaking, though embellished with the slang of 1950s Savile Row, is distinct.


That’s useful, because The Cutting of the Cloth is a play that builds its story on the personification of broader conflicts. Its leads, Spijak and Eric, two aging master craftsmen who share a space in London’s bespoke capital, nearly come to blows over their different worldviews: Eric sees work as a means to an end and handles prestigious orders with his mechanical sewing machine, while Spijak is a hand-sewing traditionalist. While both men see themselves as masters of their art, they rely on the labor of their kippers—female tailors who work in pairs—and the cutters who prepare the cloth of the suits. Witness to this system is Maurice, an apprentice who develops over the course of the play into an artist.


But what does it take to become an artist? The ability to endure is part of it, thinks Spijak, and Maurice’s indenture is an opportunity to test this conviction. At first, the tailor has several complaints about his apprentice—Maurice is left handed, he wears a thimble and he’s not sufficiently Jewish. Religious piety and commitment to the craft are one for Spijak, who is one of the great, tortured old men common in the American theater. His devotion serves as an example for Maurice, by whom he demands to be called “‘sir’ or ‘that bleeding tyrant’ according to the amount of fear and pain” he inspires (17). In one euphoric scene, Spijak invites Eric to beat up a new jacket in order to demonstrate the resilience of hand-sewn craft. But Hastings never says definitively whether the durability of his (and Eric’s) art is worth the pain and suffering they inflict on others.


“SYDIE: My Mother did everything Spijak ever told her. She did it all her life. And she still did nothing right. The day she died he was still shouting at her. He was shouting in the Service and he was still shouting when they burned her” (28).


Iris and Sydie, the two kippers in the studio, prevent The Cutting of the Cloth from becoming a trainwreck of masculine Angst. Despite the animosity between their bosses, the women treat each other with kindness, and Sydie, Spijak’s daughter, even reaches out to Maurice at the beginning of his apprenticeship. Kippers like her face abuse because of the strict division of labor on Savile Row: they are confined to low-paying jobs, subject to their employer’s schedule and punished for speaking too often. These hierarchies were common in the 1950s, but it’s conspicuous that the tailors, who serve Britain’s entrenched upper classes, mimic their hierarchies. Sydie encourages Maurice to leave the trade, but as grows more confident he feels entitled to reject her and Iris and to dismiss minor alterations as “kipper’s work.”


A kinder play would free its female characters. A more hopeful play make Maurice the hero. But The Cutting of the Cloth is an examination, not a labor of love. But, perhaps because of the suffering it depicts, the play becomes the kind of Craft its characters extoll.

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