On the outside, looking in

Slope's new hi-tech approach will further the play's underlying theme of voyeurism. This originally developed, not out of the script, but from the starting point of Laing's design.

"All those years ago," Carter recalls, "Stewart had this design, and wanted to develop a piece of work using it. It struck me that having an audience peering down into a bathroom is as voyeuristic as you can get, and at the time there was a lot of stuff going round about Pete Doherty and all these badly behaved rock stars, so I applied that to Verlaine and Rimbaud. It's about realism, and it's about naturalism, and it seemed to me that the best thing would be to write a very straightforward play, albeit one in which the room is a character.

"Then Stewart talked to me again about wanting to do the play specifically in a studio theatre space. We looked at it again, and because it's being done in a different space, that dictated certain structural changes. It's still the same story, with the same three characters, but for me it's about the spatial relationship between the audience and the actor. It's not a literary event."

The original production of Slope was Carter's first collaborations with Untitled, since when she has scripted the company's 21st-century reworking of Marivaux's La Dispute, An Argument About Sex. More recently, Carter penned Untitled's hit collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland, Paul Bright's Confessions Of A Justified Sinner, which has since toured to Sweden and Ireland and visits several international theatre festivals in 2015.

As a dramaturg too, Carter has worked on many of the most vital pieces of theatre seen in Scotland in recent times. She has forged a close working relationship with Vanishing Point, with whom she has worked on Interiors, Saturday Night, and, most recently, the haunting Tomorrow.

As a playwright, Carter has written What We Know for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, which also hosted Carter's own EK company's production of Game Theory. Carter has also worked with the National Theatre of Scotland, Tramway and the Finborough Theatre.

Yet, despite such an impressive string of credits, it is not Carter's name one readily associates with such works as Interiors and Paul Bright's Confessions Of A Justified Sinner, and it seems at times that she simply isn't getting the credit she deserves. While much of this is down to the collaborative nature of her work, it is also in part down to how it is contextualised. If judged in terms of a visual art or live art context rather than a theatrical one, perhaps her profile might appear higher.

"A lot of literary managers find it hard to read my work," Carter says.

"The vocabulary of my work is non-literary, and the working relationships I've developed have all been based on friendship and trust as artists, and I get to work with people I really like as artists. The reason I ended up in Glasgow was to do my PhD in visual art and performance, and I taught on the Contemporary Theatre Practice course at what was then RSAMD (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland).

"It's a fairly niche place I operate in, but I can't bash my way through a TV script just to make money. That makes things financially difficult, but spiritually and artistically I'm probably richer. I have friends writing for TV, and they talk to me about all the compromises they have to make.

"For me that's the opposite of what art is about, and you just end up with this lowest common denominator thing. But do I feel hard done by? Of course I do."

Given that Untitled Projects has just been turned down by Creative Scotland for three-year Regular Funding, a move which may jeopardise the company's future, Carter may well have good reason to feel hard done by.

In the meantime, she has commissions for the Traverse and the National Theatre of Scotland ongoing, as well as work with the Yard Theatre in London. Carter is also about to embark on a course to learn about writing for opera.

"I'm interested in form," she says. "I've been thinking about opera for a while, and it's a chance to learn about something new. I'm always looking for some new challenge."

This is evident in Carter's ongoing work with Swedish conceptual art duo, Goldin + Senneby.

"They're very much against the idea of the artist as author," Carter explains of a project that looks at the nature of financial reality by way of alchemy and algorithmic trading. "They're interested in financial and tyrannical structures."

Again, context is everything for Carter in work which is as much at times an exploration of herself as the ideas that stem from that. Given just how much she doesn't make life easy for herself, what is it that drives Carter to work in this way?

"A difficult childhood?" she suggests. "I've been reading the psychologist, Adam Phillips, and he talks a lot about not getting it. I make work that some people don't always get, work that, if it doesn't make me feel uncomfortable, then I'm not that interested in it.

"I'm half Chinese, and was brought up by my father, but was surrounded by the Chinese side of the family, who would all be talking to me, or at me, with me not having a clue what they were on about. So I'm kind of used to not getting it, and as much as I can work in the mainstream if they'll have me, maybe I've deliberately put myself outside it."

Slope, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, November 12-22; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, November 26-29. Slope will be live-streamed at www.kiltr.com/slope. Signing up to the site is required.