EIF: Make it Happen

Festival Theatre, 2/8/2025

 James Graham’s ‘Make it Happen’, Andrew Panton, director, Brian Cox, Adam Smith, Sandy Grierson, Fred Goodwin

 The EMR originally decided not to review the Festival blockbuster, ‘Make it Happen’, as it is intrinsically a straight play. However, when I went to the Festival Theatre on Saturday evening, it was clear that there's a great deal of singing, quite a lot of choreography and swathes of incidental music. The playwright James Graham has created an endlessly fascinating exposé of the build-up, near triumph but finally total destruction of Scotland's two great banks, with particular reference to the Royal Bank of Scotland. 

In this stunning play, brilliantly directed by Andrew Panton, a co-production of the Edinburgh International Theatre, Dundee Rep Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland, we see how Fred Goodwin, an electrician’s son from Paisley, fought his way through the Scottish education system to become firstly a chartered accountant, then a banker with the National Australia Bank as it took over the Clydesdale Bank, and eventually deputy CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Gaining the reputation of Fred the Shred, a ruthless cutter of costs and jobs, he became, in 2001, the Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Bank, an august institution founded in 1727. With his hostile takeover of Nat West, he took RBS to the top of world banking, but hubris and vanity combined to knock him and the Bank off their perch in 2008, to the extent that, after Government intervention, The Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed into a subsection of Nat West, with most shares initially owned by the UK Government. The parallel story of the collapse of the even older Bank of Scotland (founded in 1695) was alluded to in the play, but the main thrust was the rise and fall of Goodwin. The clever theatrical twist was the intermittent appearance of the ghost of Adam Smith, the Enlightenment philosopher and economic thinker, whose writings were supposed to be the basis of everything that Goodwin did. Brian Cox, the famous Dundonian film and TV actor, played the role of Adam Smith to a T, with humour and panache, and it is his presence that has made the run of performances total sell-outs, demonstrating clearly the enormous power of Television in modern culture.

We could actually have done with more of Mr Cox, since his absence for large parts of the play did rather represent a lowering of the excitement of the evening. Sandy Grierson, as Goodwin, was absolutely brilliant, his west coast burr standing out in a sea of Edinburgh accents, and I really liked Andy Clark as Gordon Brown, although I feel he got off relatively easily in historical responsibility. The actor playing Alastair Darling was unfortunately stuck with a caricature which was neither accurate nor fair.

Martin Lowe’s music and the movement direction of Emily Jane Boyle were mostly excellent and apposite, and I was surprised how much music there was, performed with much spirit and no little skill by the large ensemble cast. It would have helped if some attempt had been made to tell the audience who played which roles, but the very limited freesheet was miserly in terms of information.

Some commentators have objected to the length of the play, but I must say I found that it whizzed along, and there was a sense of something special and magical afoot, as we tumbled out into the Edinburgh evening.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner