Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken WanIn 1987 Paul Bright, a radical young Scottish director, set out to stage James Hogg’s Confessions of Justified Sinner in a series of events in unusual locations across Scotland. Read more …
Untitled Projects have been working with the actor George Anton to assemble an archive of these landmark productions.
We've found amazing original film footage, and recreated some of our own. We've interviewed those involved in making the work and those who saw it. They’ve given us old photographs, some anecdotes and some secrets...
In 2013 we share this material in live performance and exhibition that celebrate the work of an unsung hero of Scottish theatre.
In my copy of Hogg's novel, bought secondhand in Glasgow a couple of decades ago, I found a badly torn newspaper clipping with no headline or date, which I kept as a bookmark. It concludes: "...the talking crows. This intriguing attempt to relocate Hogg in our present time brims with bright ideas but struggles to give them shape and direction." These words by this unknown reviewer so accurately reflect the present production I can only add that the experience, if less gripping than the book, is, at times, vivid and thought-provoking.
Laing and Carter’s work achieves a thrllling poetic intensity; and touches on something wild and self-destructive in Scotland, and in the human spirit, that links the story of the haunted Robert Wringhim to that of Paul Bright, driven by his own demons all the way to the snow-blasted Borders summit where the two stories seem to rest together, at last.
Coupled with Anton's relaxed and natural performance there is no doubt they have given us something of an event which manages to blur the division between reality and imagination.
Whatever one decides it is, there is no denying that these assiduously non-confessional Confessions provide an often witty, occasionally hilarious, and always excellently acted (if slightly self-satisfied) evening’s theatre.
An intelligent, interdisciplinary performance that brings together video, live performance, and a degree of object fetishism.
An audacious, satisfying project and well worth returning to revisit the exhibition, which is open for another half hour after the end of George Anton’s lecture.
A meta-theatricality is created, as the talk about a play becomes a play that questions the very nature of theatre, using the invented retrospective to showcase the traditional and technological ways its definition can be challenged. It is a welcome and fascinating concept to be left thinking about.
Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner Reconstructed
Tramway, Glasgow from Friday June 14, 2013, until Saturday June 29, 2013. More info: www.tramway.org
Summerhall, Edinburgh from Thursday October 17, 2013, until Saturday October 26, 2013.
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