When Paul Bright's Confessions Of A Justified Sinner was first presented by Untitled Projects and the National Theatre of Scotland last year, the performance and accompanying exhibition were far from straightforward interpretations of James Hogg's novel, a possibly unreliable memoir on the alleged crimes of its narrator, Robert Wringham.

Rather, in the hands of director Stewart Laing, playwright Pamela Carter and a network of visual artists and researchers from the 85A collective, Paul Bright's Confessions found actor George Anton relate memories of a legendary stage version of Hogg's book presented in the late 1980s by the maverick figure of radical theatre director Bright.

Anton's monologue was accompanied by scrappy film footage of incidents and rehearsals surrounding Bright's production, alongside interviews with Bright's fellow travellers. What emerged from the play, alongside the exhibition's meticulously observed archive, was a reconstruction of an era when such a singular and subversive artistic vision could still find a platform in Scotland in a way that might not be the case today.

Laing's production is particularly evocative of a pre-1990 Glasgow, with specific local and historical references that you might think would not translate well. It is a welcome surprise, then, to discover that the show has not only had a successful run in Sweden since it first played in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but that tonight it opens at Dublin Theatre Festival - on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theatre in everything but name.

"The show is so Glasgow-specific," says Laing, "and it was something we were concerned about. It was something producers were concerned about as well, I think, when we sat down with them. They asked us how we thought it might translate, but that was a question we had to ask them as well.

"It went really well in Sweden. We did it without surtitles, but gave everyone a glossary, to explain what the Old Firm was, and who The Krankies were, just to give people a little bit of help. But I think the show is a lot more universal than that. I know Pamela thinks of it as a love story, but for me it's about truth and reality.

"The letter at the end of the show is a letter describing something that didn't happen, but for me it's so much better than what did happen, so for me it's about the power of art, and that's what excites me about the show just now."

At the heart of Bright's attention to detail is a conceit that it may be best that audiences remain unaware of until they go to see it. What they do with it once they do become aware of the show's meticulous array of reconstruction and theatrical insider knowledge, however, is up to them.

"It's a bit like The Mousetrap," says Laing, "and we come and go about the central conceit of the show, but for me now, it's out in the public domain, it's been reviewed, and people can describe it however they want to. The concern we have now is to make things as clear as possible, as before I think there were a lot of people who left the theatre maybe not getting the conceit, so we've changed a few things at the end of the show. For instance, we've changed the credits in the film to highlight the fact that Owen Whitelaw plays Paul Bright."

This may appease some members of the show's original audience who perhaps took issue with the idea of suspension of disbelief that fuels any theatre.

"Someone told me they thought what we were doing was unethical," says Laing, "which I find extraordinary that, in a fictional form, because you pretend something is true, people then expect it to be true. Nobody questions whether Hamlet is real when you go to see Shakespeare, and it's the same here."

Untitled Projects is one of several Scottish companies whose work features in this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. As well as Confessions of A Justified Sinner, The Arches is taking Robert Softley's solo piece, If These Spasms Could Speak, while DTF's family programme has Shona Reppe's The Curious Scrapbook Of Josephine Bean.

Also featured this year is Back To Back Theatre's production of Ganesh Versus The Third Reich, which was seen in this year's Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme, and which forms part of a mini season of Australian work in Dublin.

Elsewhere, Edinburgh Festival Fringe regular Tim Crouch will present a new piece with long-term collaborator Andy Smith, what happens to the hope at the end of the evening.

These will play alongside new plays by Irish writers Tom Murphy and Mark O'Rowe, while Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hamlet for the Berlin Schaubuhne has already opened DTF with a bang.

"They have a really good mix of Irish and international work at the Dublin Theatre Festival," Laing explains. "I just love the fact that I get to do it again, and that there's a wider audience for it. I've worked a lot in opera, and that happens a lot in opera, that something can be revived two or three years after you've first done it, and since the National Theatre of Scotland was started, that's started to happen here as well."

Given that Fergus Linehan, who was director of DTF between 2000-2004, is now in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival, perhaps a similar ethos will be developed there as well.

With more festival dates pending in 2015, Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner looks set to subvert the mainstream in a way that some of the show's real-life forebears couldn't. Laing cites American theatre director Richard Foreman and, closer to home, the Glasgow-based Ken Davidson as major influences on his work.

"I'm a huge fan of the work Ken Davidson did at Tramway in the early 90s," says Laing. "I think we all know a Paul Bright, whose radical ideas make for an uncomfortable fit with the mainstream. In Glasgow especially we like a rebel, someone who just gets on and does what they want and doesn't care what people think."

Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner, Abbey Theatre, on the Peacock Stage, Dublin, tonight to Saturday. Dublin Theatre Festival runs to Sunday.

www.dublintheatrefestival.com