Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Paul Bright isn't the man standing before us on stage. Veteran TV actor George Anton is. He's here to evoke the ghost of this maverick director, who briefly caught the mood of late 1980s Glasgow with a series of theatre adaptations of James Hogg's 1824 novel Confessions of a Justified Sinner. 

Bright, we're told, adapted his duelling, murderous, hell-bound source using a style of "Scottish naturalism" that he developed under the influence of avant-garde drama theorist Antonin Artaud, LSD and watching too much Taggart. We're shown shaky documentary footage of a frock-coated duel on Arthur's Seat, and a brawl scene in a Glasgow pub that turned into a real sectarian riot. If this story appeals, you might want to stop reading now, safe in the knowledge you're in for a theatrical ride as breakneck as anything Hogg could come up with.

Because this masterpiece of documentary theatre is actually an ingenious hoax from playwright Pamela Carter. Bright's trajectory echoes the tortuous, devil-possessed decline of Hogg's hero, making for a fiendishly successful adaptation of a novel that's all but unstageable. Anton tells us that his first role out of drama school was Mephistopheles, and it fits: he's shaven-headed and lithe, oddly untroubled by sentimentality, as he holds us rapt with demonic intensity.

The result is an elegy for all the Fringe productions that have been lost without a trace, for forgotten theatrical riots, for artists too mad and too brilliant to take a pay cheque. Like Bright, it'll grab you by the throat and won't let go.