MAKE IT HAPPEN
Edinburgh International Festival
★★★
“it’s left to Brian Cox to bring a craggy humanity to Adam Smith, and to deliver the best lines”
James Graham’s latest play, Make It Happen, and written for the National Theatre of Scotland is, fittingly, thoroughly Scottish in theme and character, and set in Edinburgh. It’s about the former CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland, Fred Goodwin. Directed by Andrew Panton of the Dundee Rep, and starring Scottish actors Brian Cox and Sandy Grierson, the play is staged with lashings of petty power plays, and dollops of hubris. It is presented as a satire, but it’s really a presentation of Faustian bargains, struck during the banking excesses at the turn of the millennium.
Make It Happen has more than a few echoes of an ancient Greek satyr play, complete with singing, dancing, and liberal use of expletives. And into this complex dramaturgical mix comes the moral philosopher Adam Smith (inventor of modern capitalism), musing on the complexities of time travel and wondering how his work came to be bastardized by neoliberalism and the world of modern finance. For fans of works like Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, Lucy Prebble’s ENRON, and Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy, James Graham’s play will seem like another piece of the puzzle of this world. Indeed, Royal Bank of Scotland was directly linked with many key players in the earlier plays. How were these businesses, and their CEOs, given the power to bring the world to the brink of financial disaster? And, in the nearly twenty years since the financial crisis of 2008, has anything been learned? As Graham reminds us, it was the “little people” who got burned by all the mergers and acquisitions. Even disgraced CEOs like Goodwin still managed to walk away with substantial pension pots.
The piece wisely focuses on the main character of Fred Goodwin, played by Sandy Grierson. There is too much ground to cover otherwise, and the play is already overly lengthy. Graham solves the problem of how to incorporate all the other political and financial figures swirling around Goodwin by creating an ensemble of actors who move like a Greek Chorus. The ensemble steps continually in and out of a variety of characters, some well known, like former PM Gordon Brown, and his Chancellor Alistair Darling, and some obscure like Goodwin’s bullied assistant, Elliott. Significantly, we never meet Goodwin’s wife, or friends. Goodwin isn’t a charismatic figure himself, however, and this is why the weighty ballast of Brian Cox’s Adam Smith is needed—to anchor this drama. Otherwise it might be prone to fly away on a wind of advertising jingles and Karaoke moments as Goodwin and his team unwind from time to time on their quest for ever more outrageous leveraged buyouts. For all the witty references to Edinburgh life, and its glory days as the intellectual powerhouse known as the Athens of the North in the eighteenth century, Make It Happen is often short on satire and long on nostalgia. When Goodwin and Adam Smith take a snowy tour of the statues of Edinburgh, Smith comments that he and his friend David Hume are captured in poses that are nothing like the men they are supposed to represent. It’s a reminder that the present cannot bring the past back to life, but only freeze it in unnatural poses. Graham’s portrait of Fred Goodwin seems equally unnatural at times, despite all Sandy Grierson’s efforts to make him sympathetic. But that is often the problem with satires. They serve a moral purpose, rather than a dramatic one, and it’s left to Brian Cox to bring a craggy humanity to Adam Smith, and to deliver the best lines. If Grierson carries this lengthy play, it is Cox who comes on to humanize the satyrs in the boardroom, and to make us wish he had more time on stage.
Andrew Panton’s direction makes the most of the talented cast, and his movement director, Emily Jane Boyle, does lovely work with the choreography of the ensemble. The lighting design (Lizzie Powell) sometimes produced light that was too strongly directed into the audience’s eyes, but otherwise made the most of the opportunities for lighting magic. The set (Anna Fleischle) was a practical combination of oblong shapes that hinted at corporate headquarters while allowing lots of space for video projection. The combination of technology, lighting and sound provided just the right amount of a non naturalistic environment for the ensemble to move in and out of their characters with ease and conviction.
Make It Happen gives us much to think about. See it if you can, but be prepared for a long evening. This is a production chock full of ideas, not surprisingly, but feels, at present, a bit overstuffed.
MAKE IT HAPPEN
Edinburgh International Festival
Reviewed on 1st August 2025 at Edinburgh Festival Theatre
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Marc Brenner
