Festival Theatre
Paul Bright’s Confessions Of A Justified Sinner
Queen’s Hall
Keith Bruce
Five stars
IN what is the sort of turnaround at a venue more associated with the Fringe, until Saturday the Queen’s Hall is transformed on a daily basis from the Edinburgh International Festival’s classical chamber music recital venue (and BBC outside broadcast studio) into a lecture theatre, where George Anton revives his remarkable presentation – previously seen at Summerhall as part of the Fringe – on the life and career of the emblematic Scottish theatre artist Paul Bright and the performance history of his response to the classic novel by James Hogg.
Those familiar with earlier version of the piece, written by regular collaborator Pam Carter for Stewart Laing’s Untitled Projects company, will delight in the tweaks in the script for this EIF revival, itself Fergus Linehan’s deliberate contradiction of the “death slot” for new Scottish work in the Festival programme satirised in the script. No-one, however, could have foreseen that the running time of this year’s new production from Scotland, David Greig’s adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, would add piquancy to the remembrances of the epic length of his supposed contribution to the 1989 Festival.
But Paul Bright’s Confessions is about much more than holding a mirror up to the recent history of the arts and particularly experimental theatre performance in Scotland. It is itself a perfectly valid homage to Hogg, with the unfolding narrative of the relationship between “George Anton” and “Paul Bright” mirroring the story of Robert Wrigham and Gilmartin. Beyond that it is about truth and deceit, the actor as “uber-liar” and the tortured artist as a pathological seeker after truth.
It is also very funny indeed, especially, but far from exclusively, if you know the era and its personel.
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