It begins like a relentless karaoke night - and mostly without its star, Brian Cox - but the EIF’s financial crash drama finds its footing in a memorable second half, writes Joyce McMillan
THEATRE
Make It Happen
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
★★★★☆
IT WAS ONE of those Festival opening nights when the air feels charged with electricity and expectation; a playwright acclaimed across UK theatre, a mighty theme, and on stage, a true Scottish superstar, in the shape of Dundee’s most famous son, Brian Cox.
And in the end, James Graham’s new play Make It Happen does not disappoint; although it does take its audience on a fierce roller-coaster ride toward its powerful final scenes, over-running by almost an hour on the length predicted in the Festival brochure, treating the audience to an overlong and largely unnecessary first half, and sailing close to the wind by failing to introduce its biggest star until well into that first half.
For all its ups and downs, though, Andrew Panton’s production - co-produced by Dundee Rep, the Edinburgh International Festival and the National Theatre of Scotland - is big, spectacular and ambitious from the outset. Its theme is the rise and fall of Fred Goodwin, the Royal Bank of Scotland boss who, around the turn of millennium, first built up the bank into one of the largest corporations in the world, and then saw his world collapse in the great financial crash of 2008, partly triggered by RBS’s colossal debts. And it sets its essential confrontation between Goodwin and the long-dead moral philosopher Adam Smith - played in terrific style by Sandy Grierson and Brian Cox - against a backdrop peopled by a chorus of 14 powerful Scottish actors, who not only sing and move impressively as a group, but also provide the cast of other characters who help shape the story, including a powerful Andy Clark as Chancellor and then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who, as a well-grounded Kirkcaldy man like Adam Smith, finally brought that terrifying crisis under control.
The first half, though, consists largely of repetitions of Goodwin’s dumbed-down version of Smith’s philosophy, idolising free markets at the expense of every aspect of civic and political virtue, in his drive for perpetual growth. The style is spectacular, the towering stage filled with the shifting light and imagery of Finn den Hertog and Lizzie Powell’s light and video design; the effect is like being trapped in some relentless millennial club or karaoke night.
In the second half, though, James Graham finally gets his teeth into the real story, which concerns the appalling global financial crash of 2008, and Goodwin’s long-delayed reckoning with the more subtle aspects of Adam Smith’s thought. Sandy Grierson, as Goodwin, is both frightening and poignant, a working-class boy made good, and willingly deluded by the presiding assumptions of an age of unfettered greed. And Cox makes a brilliant job of capturing the many faces of Graham’s Adam Smith, from vain old advocate of commercial freedom besotted with the joys of shopping in John Lewis, to commanding moral philosopher finally rebuking Goodwin for the half-baked understanding of his work on economy and society that it has suited so many of the rich and powerful to promote, these last 50 years; in a story about the origins of our fractured and dangerous times in which Scotland itself - from Adam Smith to Gordon Brown - has played a vital part, messily but brilliantly celebrated in this memorable play for today.
JOYCE MCMILLAN
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