Chancellor Reeves could learn from the message of banking's demise in new play

Make It Happen satirises the RBS collapse of 2008. It's too close to real life for comfort, writes Ian Fraser

- Ian Fraser

Within a few months of taking over as chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in March 2000, Fred Goodwin adopted a new slogan: "Make It Happen". Fresh from acquiring NatWest, a bank three times RBS's size, and in a sign of hubris to come, he had it plastered over Heathrow Express trains and on airport gangways worldwide.

In James Graham's new play Make It Happen - the centrepiece of this year's Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme - Goodwin, brilliantly played by Edinburgh-born actor Sandy Grierson, frequently barks out the slogan after giving cowering subordinates another outlandish set of orders.

These include "get the Queen to open our new headquarters" and "buy me a first edition of The Wealth of Nations".

Graham's play - a "fictionalised satire" that conveys the story of the RBS collapse in a highly entertaining way using song, dance, burlesque, quasi-pantomime and horror - has three core messages.

First is that Edinburgh wasn't just the epicentre of the Enlightenment, the period of intense intellectual activity from the 1750s to the 1790s that gave birth to free-market capitalism through the works of Adam Smith. The city was also proximate to the global financial crisis - which, without the enforced generosity of taxpayers, almost snuffed out free-market capitalism.