You could distinctly hear the murmurs of recognition from the Edinburgh audience – responding to knowing mentions of the city’s Leith and Morningside areas, the building of Royal Bank of Scotland’s immense Gogarburn HQ, the institution’s towering greed and ambition – during James Graham’s epic new history of RBS, its single-minded CEO Fred Goodwin and the 2008 financial crisis that was unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival.
There are clearly still-fresh memories, unresolved issues, unhealed wounds about Goodwin’s decade in charge that transformed RBS into the biggest bank in the world, only for it to crumble and crash on its fragile sub-prime foundations. Those memories and wounds are something Graham plays on in his darkly comic survey of RBS’s years of audacity, end-of-history greed and unquestioning self-belief.
And two sides to his witty account quickly emerge. The first of them is a clear-headed explanation of RBS’s rise and fall, and the deals, mergers and takeovers involved, which Graham whizzes through, jargon-free, in typically fluent, entertaining fashion – complete with song and dance numbers, dispatched in a smooth, stylish staging by director Andrew Panton. Sandy Grierson makes for a Goodwin so cool, bland and detached that he almost sinks into the background, were it not for the famously spontaneous firings and the breathtaking self-assurance that allowed him to stare down those in power. Goodwin’s own history as a working-class Paisley boy made good gets wheeled out again and again, but increasingly it’s as a justification for brutal single-mindedness, and Grierson brings an appropriately hard, unforgiving edge to the character’s determination.
The show’s starrier turn, however, is Brian Cox as the ghost of Adam Smith, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher/economist and Goodwin’s guiding spirit (even if Goodwin ultimately finds himself appalled at Smith’s snowflake liberalism). Graham conjures him into the present day for intellectual sparring matches with Goodwin, Cox’s John Lewis-loving Smith gleefully spewing deliciously jarring colloquialisms. Even funnier, however, is Cox’s earlier appearance as himself at a nauseating Goodwin-organised RBS "pageant" to celebrate the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament, and at which the actor leaves us in no doubt as to his feelings towards the corporate sector.
But Make It Happen’s sparky humour – and there’s plenty of it – is also in some ways the show’s downfall. Graham seems so intent on explaining and entertaining that questions and criticism don’t get much of a look-in. Though clearly deeply dislikable, Grierson’s Goodwin seems more mischievous than sociopathic, and it’s surely a mistake to refocus on PM Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling as the crisis kicks in, leaving Goodwin’s apparent disregard for the cataclysm he’s caused unexamined. Similarly, the finger-wagging reminders from Cox’s Smith of the necessity of regulation and moral compassion are passed over as ironic plot points, rather than illustrated with real-life impacts that Goodwin’s disregard for them has caused.
Make It Happen offers a substantial evening full of entertainment – and its digs at Edinburgh’s institutions and traditions elicit plenty of knowing cackles. But in doing so, it holds back resolutely from true condemnation, tutting at naughtiness rather than snarling at injustice.
- Until 9 August
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
