Most regular arts page
readers will have heard of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A
Justified Sinner, James Hogg's seminal nineteenth century Scottish
novel. This will be the case despite the fact that the book was
initially published anonymously, and was hugely neglected during
Hogg's lifetime. Only in the twentieth century was Hogg's finest work
pretty much rediscovered and given the classic status it so richly
deserves.
The same excavation of
unknown brilliance looks set to happen to Paul Bright, who, according
to director Stewart Laing and writer Pamela Carter, was an
avant-garde director who in 1987 staged dramatised extracts of Hogg's
novel in a set of site-specific performances at locations that
included Arthur's Seat. Now, along with actor George Anton and a
coterie of artists and film-makers, Laing's Untitled Projects company
in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and Tramway
will look at Bright's all too brief moment in the spotlight before he
disappeared from view forever. Paul Bright's Confessions of A
Justified Sinner may take the form of a simple performance lecture,
but it raises serious questions about art, authenticity and
archiving.
In a rehearsal room,
Anton is talking us through some grainy Super 8 film footage of one
of the performances in which a group of men in period costume are
playing tennis. There is no soundtrack, and as some kind of argument
breaks out, it isn't clear what it's about. Whatever it is, there's a
guerilla style feel to both the performance and the footage that
resembles some of the early work of Derek Jarman. At one point, the
main protagonist stares straight at the camera, full of grim
determination to make his point. This is the Paul Bright Laing and
Carter want to capture.
“We've been talking
about adapting Justified Sinner for years,” says Carter, “and I
met George Anton by chance in a pub in London. He spotted that I was
reading Confessions of A Justified Sinner at the time, and started
talking to me about it. He was the one who connected us to Paul
Bright.”
Laing had been half
aware that some radical site-specific work was being made during his
own time directing at the Citizens theatre, which coincided with
Anton's time at the Citz.
“There was something
about the Citz in the late 80s that was like a ring-fenced
community,” Laing remembers. “We were all sitting down in the
Gorbals thinking that we were the only thing in Scottish theatre, and
it was only when George started talking about this production that I
realised that I wasn't at the centre of the world in the late 80s,
and that the centre of the world was somewhere else.”
Laing, Carter and Anton
pursued various forms of research, which, given that their subject
was around in a pre-digital age, wasn't easy. This raised issues of
how theatre is archived compared to the visual art world.
“I have a real
interest in the issue of archiving live performance,” says Laing.
“I spent some time looking through The Wooster Group's archive, and
(Wooster group artistic director) Liz LeCompte is obsessed with
archiving, because I think she has a sense of herself as a great
American artist, and I would agree with her on that. But it's about
how you maintain that once you're gone. Andy Warhol is a great
American artist, and there is this body of work, so I think that Liz
is very deliberately creating a legacy. When they did Brace Up, they
recorded every single rehearsal. There are three shelves of tapes
recorded on a camcorder, so if you're interested, you can go in and
watch, from the first day they sat down and talked about it, to every
single performance they ever did.”
There is no such
archive for Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner, nor any
of Bright's work. According to Laing, Bright dropped out of view
shortly after the production, and as far as he is aware, never made
theatre again.
Laing and Carter's
piece is not just a homage to Bright. Their subject becomes a symbol
of how easy it is for radical artists unwilling or unable to play
industry games to drop out of view. Laing cites Buzz Goodbody, the
female theatre director who blazed a trail through the Royal
Shakespeare Company in the early 1970s, but is now barely known.
Instrumental in developing the RSC's The Other Place studio theatre,
Goodbody committed suicide in 1975 aged twenty-eight.
“Apparently, she did
this amazing version of Hamlet that just blew the play apart,” says
Laing, “but she was a heroin addict, and she died a few months
after she'd done it. For me, Buzz Goodbody is as interesting a part
of British theatre history as Stephen Daldry. Lindsay Kemp is someone
else who people tend not to have heard of. Some people vaguely know
him as a choreographer, and people tend to say, oh, is he still
alive? Actually, he is, and is living in Italy, and a lot of people
don't know that he started off as a theatre director, and did all
this amazing work.”
Carter goes even
further, and points to a far bigger cultural shift.
In terms of British
theatre in the mid to late 1980s,” she says, “there were all this
experimental performance work that seems to have drifted out of our
general consciousness. There were groups like Impact and Pip Simmons,
that were part of my theatre history, but don't seem to be part of a
younger generation of theatre makers. So this show is very much a
part of trying to reclaim some of that and remind people why it was
important.”
Paul Bright's
Confessions of A Justified Sinner, Tramway, Glasgow, June 14th-29th
Untitled Projects – A
history
Founded by Stewart
Laing in 1998, Untitled Projects aimed from the start to channel
Laing's very personal theatrical vision with an assortment of
collaborators.
1998-2000 – Myths of
the Near Future – Adaptations of three short stories by JG Ballard
performed in locations ranging from a suburban house to a disused
swimming pool.
2006 – Slope –
Laing's fascination with French literature resulted in this look at
poets Verlaine and Rimbaud via a script by Pamela Carter and played
in a sunken performance space with the audience looking down on the
action.
2009 – An Argument
About Sex – A response to Marivaux's play, La Dispute, Pamela
Carter again scripted this work about a scientific experiment in
which teenagers are isolated in an attempt to highlight the inherent
differences between the sexes.
2012 – The Salon
Project – This recreation of a nineteenth century salon had the
audience wearing full period costume while they were regaled by the
finest minds of their generation.
The Herald, June 13th 2013
ends
Comments