Make It Happen with Brian Cox – Edinburgh International Festival review

Playwright James Graham has so far largely made his name as an analyst of Englishness. This House explored a very English House of Commons, while for plays like Dear England, the clue is in the name. For his new play, Make it Happen, however, he widens his scope to explore a global event (the 2008 financial crisis) through the prism of a different country: Scotland.

Or, perhaps more accurately, Edinburgh, which makes it a perfect centrepiece for this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, and the first delight of the play is just how right he gets the city. The script has chosen just the right restaurants, night clubs or department stores to name-drop, and Graham understands how business gets done, with deals on the golf course or the shooting moor.

At the heart of the story is Fred Goodwin, the Chief Executive who took the Royal Bank of Scotland to be the biggest bank in the world and then lost it in the humiliating crash of 2008. The other main character, however, is Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher who, centuries earlier, invented the study of Economics in Edinburgh and, in so doing, helped to kickstart the golden age of the Scottish Enlightenment. In a piece of magic realism, Graham brings Smith to life in Goodwin’s 21st-century Edinburgh, and has him played by none other than the Dundee-born Brian Cox.

Luring Cox back to the Scottish stage brings much-needed star power to this year’s Edinburgh International Festival in what is widely recognised as a quieter-than-hoped-for year. It’s rare for the big-ticket event of the EIF to be a piece of straight theatre, so it’s both refreshing and exciting to have a drama that everyone is talking about and that has all but sold out its entire run.

In truth, Cox doesn’t have that much time on stage, but makes the most of what he has, playing Smith as a camp, foul-mouthed fish out of water, who is constantly frustrated at how little his work is understood. Really, this is Goodwin’s story, however, and as such the play belongs to Sandy Grierson, who plays Goodwin with beautiful malice, a cold-hearted shark of the financial world. He’s perhaps written a little one-dimensionally, but lots of little touches paint him as a single-minded narcissist who nearly brought down the entire financial system.

The shape of the play is therefore like a conventional tragedy, with overweening hubris followed by nemesis. However, the tone is playful, the language is often very funny, and countless little touches, like Gordon Brown’s mannerisms or Alasdair Darling’s eyebrows, reveal Graham’s expertise in evoking the period with almost throwaway confidence.

The action slows down regrettably in a final hour that becomes very explanatory, with self-conscious visual aids like a banana or a panettone that put me in mind of The Big Short. The final moments feel undercooked, too, as though Graham couldn’t quite decide how to end Goodwin’s story. Nevertheless, the language is energetic, the ensemble cast brings it to life with total commitment, and it leads the audience by the hand through a scenario they think they know and makes it fresh and exciting. It’ll be a hit, and it deserves to be.