Michael Cox responds to the Edinburgh International Book Festival event--and to an acclaimed production from last decade.
I called Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner horribly wrong.
June of 2013 at the Tramway, and opening night was abuzz. What were we about to see? Was this a look at something that had happened? As I stood in the queue to be let in, I even heard the woman behind me ask another: was Paul Bright real?
The door opens and the audience walks into an archive—a collection of props and artifacts from a number of episodes Bright apparently directed over a period of time in the 1980s. And centre to all of this, brightly lit, was a portrait of Bright himself. He was a face known to me, and he wasn’t named Paul Bright.
I watched the performance and saw what I thought was a clever and amusing inside joke about Scottish theatre. I gave it three stars in my review, and then I looked on in amusement as most of my critical colleagues gave it more—along with nominations the following year at the CATS Awards. Fair play, I thought. It obviously worked for them. It was, in my opinion at the time, perfectly fine. No more.
And yet, over the years, the production haunted me—and continues to do so. It is a production I frequently reflect on and find more depth in. I smile when I see people who were involved, and there’s a flash of recognition whenever I’m at a location used for some of the footage. However, as time passes, Paul Bright’s supposed stagings keep coming back to mind—as real as if I had been there decades ago.
And here we are again. It’s 2024, and I am writing this in a corridor at the Edinburgh Futures Institute on the first floor, just a few steps out of the NW space that an event called Extraordinary Trash has just completed. And my mind is again a mesh of questions. What exactly have I just watched? A performance? A reading of a clever essay? Definitely something far richer than either of those, yet both—and far more.
Extraordinary Trash was a reflection on the performance of Paul Bright from 11 years ago (and its later remounts), but it was so much more. A question of truth and how art presents it—or fails to. An honouring of a past performance through modern eyes. A clever new episode that adds layers to a piece that already exists in multiple dimensions.
I could give a report of what happened in the hour-long running time, but it feels like doing so would argue against the very experience I’ve just had. I was moved. My thoughts about culture and live performance were questioned, challenged and pushed. And I howled in hysterics.
Extraordinary Trash is an effective conversation piece—not only with Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner but also with theatre criticism and how we remember and engage with live events. It was, in many ways, perfect.
Will it ever exist again? Will a recording do justice for anyone who wasn’t in the room? How does it even play to anyone who hadn’t seen the production from the last decade?
I haven’t a clue.
What I do know is this: Paul Bright has lived rent-free in my head for over 11 years, and I have no doubt that he—and every creative who has worked for the realisation of Bright’s concepts—will live there for much longer than that. I remember clearly the performance I saw in 2013, and I dare say I will remember what I just witnessed with equal clarity and vividness.
Time to undo an injustice from years ago. Five stars for Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner—and five stars for Extraordinary Trash as well. May the archive be kind to Paul Bright and to all who worked with him—and indeed to those of us who were there to witness it.
Extraordinary Trash was part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and was held August 18, 2024.
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