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"I think it’s a love letter actually," says Stewart Laing, director of Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, soon to be showing at the Edinburgh International Festival. "It’s a love letter to the theatre about what great theatre is; the highs and lows of it. For me, that’s what it is. It’s theatre that’s about what it is like to make theatre."

You may have seen Confessions before, back in 2013, or you may be surprised to see it again. Untitled Projects – the company that created the show, of which Laing is artistic director – are, in Laing’s words, "dormant." After their funding bid was rejected by Creative Scotland in the latter half of last year, the company sadly could not continue to make the work they wanted to in the way that they wanted to. Although they were encouraged to reapply for funding on a project to project basis, it wasn’t sufficient to keep them afloat and making work. "We still have a bank account, which doesn’t have any money in it, and we still have a board of directors, but apart from that the company is dormant at the moment," says Laing. "The show this year is an Edinburgh Festival production; they are producing the show because we didn’t have the facility to do it."

So what is the show? In some ways, it could be seen as an adaptation of an adaptation, looking at Paul Bright’s series of radical performances between 1987 and 1989, based on James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. "It’s quite complicated," Laing tells us from his sunny back garden in London. "I mean, really it’s us adapting James Hogg’s book, but in the process we’re inventing this other layer of reality."

The concept came out of two base ideas, the first, bringing in Bright’s previous shows, was a fascination with theatre archiving; "like what is left over of a piece of theatre after the show has finished – what are the lasting documents of it?" asks Laing. "We’d been talking for a long time about making a piece of theatre that was about archives, that was about fragments that remained and memories of a piece of theatre that has happened in the past. And also we were interested in doing an adaptation of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, so it was like the two ideas collided; they came together and that’s what made the show happen."

Adaptation runs through all of Untitled Projects’ work in some way, it seems, and Laing agrees. "Adaptation is very much a part of what we do. We very rarely work from existing theatre texts." Only once did they work from a play, "but we ended up really adapting that play. It was a Marivaux play called The Dispute and Pamela Carter rewrote it. Adaptation is really what we do, and reinvention I think, not necessarily just adaptation, but reinventing something for the stage."

This seems incredibly pertinent for the EIF programme, with a new adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark standing alongside Confessions. "I think that’s really interesting programming because it’s another great classic of Scottish literature," says Laing, extending his compliments to Fergus Linehan, artistic director of his first EIF programme. "I really, really love Lanark, I think it’s amazing. In a lot of ways I’m quite jealous that it’s Graham Eatough and David Greig who are doing that adaptation, because I think it is a difficult thing to do and I’m really interested to see what they do with it." Aside from maybe wishing he had adapted the mammoth novel himself, there is no worry, only excitement behind Laing’s tone, who acknowledges or perhaps expects that press and theatregoers themselves will see a chance to compare and contrast the two pieces. 

"I think it’s a real buzz being part of the Edinburgh Festival," he says, going further into congratulating Linehan’s work for commissioning new, large-scale Scottish work alongside also comissioning re-showings of existing Scottish work, with Vox Motus' Dragon as well as Confessions. "Traditionally Scottish theatre companies have been invited to the Edinburgh Festival to make new work; there’s been this sort of unwritten rule that if you’re a Scottish theatre company you need to do something that’s never been done before. For me what’s really interesting is that Fergus Linehan has changed the policy on that."

To Linehan, it just felt logical to show previous Scottish work. "The festival audience is completely different to the year-round audience, and so when the eyes of the world are trained on Scotland you really want to show them your best stuff. The only way of doing that really is reviving productions that have been successful," he told us. "In the festival there’s an incredible hunger for Scottish work." And Laing is thankful for the opportunity to be included. "It’s very exciting that Scottish theatre makers get the same opportunity as other international theatre makers."

The show itself is not fundamentally changed from its 2013 iteration. "It’s pretty much the same show but we tweak it depending on where it’s playing." Last year it performed in both Ireland and Sweden, garnering some changes to suit new audiences. "It’s very Scottish, it refers to a lot of things that I think you would expect a Scottish audience to know that maybe you wouldn’t expect a Swedish audience to know." For the International Festival audience that may not be such a problem, although performing at The Queen’s Hall, "there’s the potential for us to play to much larger audiences than we’ve ever played to before," so some tweaks may be required after all.

"I hope a lot more Scottish people get a chance to see it at Queen's Hall," says Laing. Although the play has garnered quite a buzz and is talked about in theatre circles, on a grand scale, "not that many people saw it first time round at Tramway and Summerhall when we originally did it in 2013," so Laing is excited to bring the show back to Scotland and in a larger space than before.

Untitled Projects have been known to take past work and do it another way with Slope, which they performed in 2006 and then again in 2014 in collaboration with Kiltr, live streaming the show each night. However Laing couldn’t imagine doing the same to Confessions. "I think that Confessions is just so specific to the production. Certainly at the moment I can’t imagine any other way of reflecting those ideas than the way we do it in the show in its current form."

New to the Edinburgh production will be a publication alongside the play, "so I suppose that’s sort of taking a certain set of ideas and trying to communicate them in a different form. We thought it would be good to have a publication that looked at the show in a bit of critical depth. That’s been a very exciting process, a learning process."

It comes full circle, really, to show that even in a production that couldn’t be envisioned in any other way, there is still some form of reinvention. And underneath the background, the layers of reality and the reinvention, it remains "at the centre of the show, a love story."