Make It Happen, Festival Theatre: whoever in the Edinburgh International Festival’s marketing department compared James Graham’s play on the 2008 collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland to Shakespeare has insulted the greatest playwright in the English language. The production is more Jerry Springer – the Musical meets The Big Short, without the entertainment of the former nor the elucidation of the latter.
The central premise, that Fred Goodwin, RBS’s chief executive, was obsessed with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but hadn’t even heard of Smith’s masterwork, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is too thin to explain what happened. Brian Cox, as the ghost of Adam Smith, has a few good lines, but is used far too little to redeem the play.
By camping it up with poor music and even worse jokes, Graham has thrown away a story which was a genuine tragedy – for the tens of thousands of people who lost their jobs, for the hundreds of thousands who lost their life savings, for us the taxpayers who bore the gigantic loss of preventing the bank from total collapse. Edinburgh as a city lost one of the engines of its prosperity and prestige and the festival itself lost one of its biggest sponsors.
At the centre of the story was a character full of Shakespearean contradictions. Fred Goodwin was an intelligent, experienced and able manager, with a forensic mind. His assimilation of the large and flabby NatWest into the tightly run smaller Royal Bank was literally a textbook example of how to do big mergers – Harvard Business School wrote a case study on it. The campus headquarters outside Edinburgh which Fred built saw him accused of hubris, but his obsession with detail meant that it was completed on time and on budget.
So how then did this highly professional manager, trained as an accountant in risk management become so obsessed with making RBS the biggest bank in the world that he ignored his training and all the warnings given to him? He was not alone, he had a board of heavyweights who were prepared to go along with him and a regulator too willing to overlook his flagrant breaches of the rules meant to safeguard customers’ deposits. That story has yet to be properly told.
David Gow adds:
James Graham hit the spot with his stage play Dear England and TV drama series Sherwood. They were structurally sure-footed, politically informed and insightful, and often startling. With his wannabe satire with music of the RBS débâcle he’s bitten off more than he can chew. It’s a veritable dog’s breakfast that, on a preview night, won an undeserved standing ovation from an Edinburgh claque bedazzled by Graham’s effort at his own “The Scottish play” but merits a serious reworking.
The Dundee Rep/ National Theatre of Scotland staging, with a fine array of Scots actors directed by Andrew Panton and a sparse set relying on projected video/images but with an excessive amount of deafening music, isn’t the real problem. The issue is that Graham smothers several key themes: the rebirth of Scotland via devolution and a revived parliament coinciding with the ascent of RBS to, briefly, the world’s biggest bank; the complaisance of New Labour with the surge of unbridled greed and risk in the banking sector but, equally, the lead taken by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling in rescuing and re-regulating the global financial system.
Both these poitical figures are treated sketchily, almost like cartoons. But the play’s deepest flaw is its portrayal of the two central players, Goodwin (Sandy Grierson) and Adam Smith (Brian Cox). Graham tries to humanise Fred the Shred but cannot make up his mind about him,. at times treating him like a whimpering child damaged by his Paisley council scheme upbringing and at others (therefore?) a single-minded domineering bully. This lack of clarity is accentuated by the role of “the woman in green” among a Greek-style chorus who pursues Goodwin, hissing like a Macbethian witch at him: what is she really saying?
Ray (above) rightly points to the misuse of Cox which this viewer found grotesque: given limp jokes, demeaning over-reliance on “fuck offs” and a silly obsession with John Lewis as what? An avatar of caring consumer-based capitalism? As fleetingly delivered by his truncated peroration on Smith’s moral philosophy with its stress on human sympathy and social justice and de-emphasis on self-interest. It’s almost as if Graham lacked his usual courage of conviction and was overwhelmed by his failure to master his material – not least its Scottishness.
Ray Perman is the author of Hubris (the collapse of Bank of Scotland/HBOS) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Money (Edinburgh). David Gow covered the Great Financial Crisis and the ill-fated, Promethean RBS takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro from Amsterdam and Brussels for the Guardian.
Jackie Kemp says
oh dear – sounds awful – going to see it on Monday -but then I hated Hamilton too tbh- black cast but transcript was schoolboy history and utterly craven about the issue of slavery. Some quite good songs tho
Fay Young says
Good songs and dance. You couldn’t say the same of Make it Happen
Iain Scott says
So The Lehman Trilogy it is not. Shame . The theatre critics mostly like it but Ray Perman points the way to a much more eviscerating drama of the kknd thd old 7.84 would have produced.
Interestingly a number of reviewers mentioned that the fourth wall was intact suggesting an English pieof drama as opposed to a Scottish one.