Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner - Paperback

by Pamela Carter (Text by (Art/Photo Books))

In 1987, Paul Bright, a rebellious young Scottish director set out to stage James Hogg's cult novel Confessions of a Justified Sinner in a series of radical productions across Scotland. In 2010, Untitled Projects began work with the actor George Anton to assemble an archive and exhibition of this almost-forgotten feat of theatre.
In search of the truth, they uncovered a story of obsession, reckless ambition, bad behaviour, bitter memories, and love.

Between 1987 and 1989, in the run up to Glasgow's tenure as European City of Culture, a young Scottish Director, Paul Bright created a series of radical performances based on James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Mapping the original locations from the classic novel, a series of individual episodes were staged in urban sites and landscapes across Scotland. This visionary project became a cult hit, expanding its budgets and audiences as it progressed before eventually imploding publicly in its insanely ambitious final instalment.In 2013 the artists at Untitled Projects had been immersing themselves in the traces of this influential production in an attempt to understand how it all came together and ultimately fell apart. They want to share their fascination with this Scottish theatrical phenomenon by creating a new piece of documentary theatre that reconstructs Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Using material from the original production such as models and archival video, as well as script readings and personal reminiscence, they aspire to engage a new audience with this historical live performance that, by the very nature of the ephemeral art form they work in, can no longer be experienced directly.

Includes commentary on the 'making of', photographs, film stills, performance scripts and critical essays by Trish Reid, Gareth K. Vile and Dee Heddon

Author Biography

Untitled Projects makes ambitious and adventurous theatre on a large scale. They embrace taking risks, and in doing so surprise and challenge the audience. They continually re-imagine what theatre can be: blending landscape, biography, novel, video, lecture, documentary, installation, interview, fashion, music, science and playwriting. The archive of their work is now housed at the Scottish Theatre Archive, Special Collections, Glasgow University Library.

Pamela Carter read English at King's College, London, then taught at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. She turned to writing in 2002 and amongst her plays are SLOPE (co-created with Stewart Laing, Tramway 2006), Game Theory (co-written with Selma Dimitrijevic, Traverse 2007) and An Argument about Sex (Traverse 2009). She lives in Hackney, East London.