The Bespoke Overcoat

Synopsis

The Bespoke Overcoat is an unconventional love story - the love of one old friend for another. Set in 1950s in East End of London. Fender, a clerk in a clothing business, is short of food, suffers bitterly from the cold and is unable to afford one of the coats sold by his boss, Ranting. So he asks Morry, his friend the tailor, to repair his old one. Morry believes that the coat is so far gone as to be irreparable, persuades Fender to let him make a bespoke overcoat at cost price. Against the odds of old age, ill-health and fast-developing commercialism, will Morry get the coat done in time? Based on Nikolai Gogol’s classic short story "The Overcoat", Wolf Mankowitz adapted it into a play in 1953 and later made into a short film which won an Academy Award.

Our Review:

15 June 2010

A tidy morality tale focusing on galloping commercialism and its disruption of old world ethics and values, The Bespoke Overcoat is one of Wolf Mankowitz’s best-known plays, having won an Academy Award in 1956 for best short subject.

Morry, played by George Layton, swigs on a bottle of brandy (which we soon realise he is seldom without) lamenting the death of his friend Fender and managing to extol his own virtues as a tailor at the same time. Over just 45 minutes Layton creates a neat caricature of a 1950s Jewish man in the twilight of his years. He speaks - in a rather faltering accent - of the virtues of herrings and black bread, as the relationship between him Fender highlights the power of true friendship.

We soon learn that Fender, who worked for a shipping company for most of his life, couldn’t afford a new overcoat but had convinced Morry to make him one. Having died before it was finished he returns from the afterlife, or ‘th...

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