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Confessions of a Justified Sinner

22/10/2009

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
3/5
 
In adapting James Hogg’s 1824 gothic religious parable and enduringly voguish Scots literary classic for the stage, Mark Thomson has been obliged to strip away many of the literary techniques which make it such a notable novel. Out have gone the editor’s appendices and contradictory narrative viewpoints. What remains is the unreliably narrated life story of the sinner himself, Robert Wringhim, and a short framing sequence in which a contemporary policewoman and detective discover Wringhim’s three hundred year old self-immolated corpse and his diary. The fourth wall is merely leaned upon here, with a fairly unsubtle comment on the diary’s name. “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner?” scoffs Wendy Seager’s character. “It’ll never sell with a title like that”.
 
Yet Thomson’s first adaptation of the novel eleven years ago deserves to be seen again in light of the cultural shifts the world has experienced since then. Knowledge of religious fundamentalism and its effects have been in public ownership since 9/11, so it’s important that Scotland looks back on its own history and recognises the part which almost inseparable attitudes have played in building the country.
 
Ryan Fletcher is excellent as Wringhim, the son of Lewis Howden’s carousing, ungodly Laird and a wailing, puritanical mother (Rae Hendrie): their marriage, not insignificantly, has been parentally arranged. From a pitiable, fatherless child who hungers for approval from his guardian, Kern Falconer’s fearsome Reverend Wringhim, to a man driven by religious fervour and finally driven mad by the twin and not indistinct evils of satanic influence and puritanical arrogance, Fletcher is sympathetic and fearsome by very close turns.
 
Perhaps patrons will see parallels between Fight Club’s Tyler Durden and Iain Robertson’s Gil-Martin, the smooth-talking, velvet-robed phantom who Wringhim convinces himself is a Russian prince, and who appears to Wringhim on the occasion of his becoming ‘justified’: that is, so pure as to be absolved from all future sin in the eyes of God. Perhaps he is Satan, or perhaps Wringhim has just created a separate personality through which he can express his own deep-buried savagery. And he does, embarking on a campaign of murder which draws in almost all who know him.
 
There is humour here, particularly in Falconer’s Guard, who speaks in an almost impenetrable old Scots, and in the ‘Auchtermuchty story’ monologue, while Neil Murray and Malcolm Rippeth’s design for a set of dimly-lit revolving monoliths is highly effective. Yet the gloomy inevitability of Wringhim’s eventual fate in the wake of his twisted piousness and blinkered arrogance hangs like an unfriendly spectre over this atmospheric production.
 
David Pollock
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