The story of the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland must be like catnip to James Graham, who has become the pre-eminent playwright in the country by writing niche dramas about unfathomably British subjects and unerringly striking box office gold.
The 2008 financial crash (does anyone still call it the credit crunch?) has long been documented in drama: Lucy Prebble’s surreal breakthrough play ENRON emerged as early as 2009, while Stefanno Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy offered a more oblique take in 2013.
The British end of things has largely been ignored by dramatists: you’re clearly not going to get an American playwright writing about the Royal Bank of Scotland, and for British writers the fact our nation saw RBS’s collapse first hand perhaps left it less in need of an urgent response.
Now, though, it’s 17 years on: high time the tale was told properly. And what a tale Graham has cooked up: if you were worried there wouldn’t be enough material for one play, then the problem with Make It Happen is that there’s actually material for at least three.
One is a sweeping historical drama about the close knit, hidebound world of Edinburgh banking over the last three centuries.
One is about Adam Smith, the Scottish godfather of capitalism itself, here played by the great Brian Cox in what amounts to a juicy supporting role.
And then there’s the ‘main’ plot, which follows the now infamous Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, a dour Paisley accountant with no formal banking qualifications who turned RBS into the single biggest bank in the world via a frenzy of acquisitions and hostile takeovers, that worked just so long as the global economy continued to grow. And interlinked with him is another dour Scot: Gordon Brown, who you get the impression Graham has a lot of time for, who comes into his own in the second half as he burns through his mayfly premiership in an effort to counteract the ruinous forces Goodwin unleashed.
As with every Graham play, Make It Happen is as audacious as it is fundamentally informative: of course a two-and-a-half-hour play about Scottish banking is a tall order, and of course he carries it off. But it’s a closer thing than usual.
The play feels overstuffed, in large part because having by far your most famous cast member turn up a handful of times as the amusingly plummy ghost of Adam Smith is a massive distraction. And yet it’s hard to exactly begrudge these bits. Not only is Cox a hoot as Smith’s sanguine spirit, but Graham has some real and important things to say about the nature of capitalism.
The Smith bits are essentially about how his magnum opus An Enquiry Into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations has been twisted and distorted into a keystone text for a rapacious form of rapacious extreme capitalism that the author never advocated for. Goodwin is aghast as Smith extols the virtues of restraint, charity and compassion for the poor – ideas advanced in his book but ignored by cherrypickers in favour of the invisible hand of the markets etc. It’s done in a pretty jocular way, but I feel like this is important stuff - Smith’s ideas have probably had at least as much influence on contemporary Western society as the Bible, and while you might not have read them, some of the worst people to shape your life have (or they got a summary and ran with it).
Still, in a realist drama about the collapse of RBS, it’s hard not to feel the bits where Brian Cox pops up to discuss the legacy of Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise are overloading things – a tighter, smaller play about Goodwin and Smith might have worked better.
Of course, one reason to cast Cox is that the man has rizz– something Goodwin did not. That’s not to say Sandy Grierson – who plays Goodwin – is a charisma void: far from it. But it wouldn’t be true to Goodwin’s character to suggest he was some sort of flamboyant huxter who flimflammed RBS into the abyss. In Grierson’s hands he’s an aloof pragmatist with a loathing of the Edinburgh banking elite he’s forced to mingle with after being poached from Clydesdale Bank, where he’d had great ‘success’ by ruthlessly cutting staff and costs.
In the beginning he despises the banking industry’s wasteful ostentation, but is in concord with the RBS board that growing the company exponentially is the best way to protect it from a hostile takeover – a task he pursues with a hypnotic single mindedness.
But he’s too good at it, or too good at artificially pumping up RBS’s technical value. Slowly his innate austerity slips and descends into something like megalomania. He throws caution to the wind, believing the invisible hand will always protect him. ‘Make it happen’ is his mantra - but it becomes increasingly detached from any sense of reality, a demand for impossible things.
It’s a fascinating play, but not a streamlined one. Part of the problem is Graham’s over ambitious text, but Andrew Panton’s production lacks the requisite zippiness to deal with the playwright’s propensity for density. In particular, having the cast sing songs from the year the plot has advanced to is a nice idea but means at least ten minutes of is given over to a capella renditions of landfill indie classics, which is throwing yet another confusing ingredient in.
It’s been years since I met a James Graham play I didn’t like, but Make It Happen lacks the breathless mix of form and function that make works like This House, Quiz and Best of Enemies stone cold modern classics. It’s absolutely worth seeing – it’s just that for once Graham gets a little bogged down in his own enthusiasms.