James Graham on why the 2008 crash still defines our politics

Reuters

4 days ago

Few British institutions have escaped James Graham's spotlight. The British playwright's 2017 West End hit 'Ink' examined Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper and the rise of tabloid journalism in Britain. Two years later came 'Brexit: The Uncivil War,' a televised drama dissecting the personalities and strategies behind Brexit's victorious Vote Leave campaign. In his acclaimed 2024 show 'Dear England,' Graham turned to soccer, telling the story of former England manager Gareth Southgate and the men's national team's impact on the country's psyche.
In his forthcoming show 'Make It Happen,' starring "Succession" actor Brian Cox, Graham sets his sights on the Royal Bank of Scotland — which claimed one of the world's largest bailouts after collapsing under risky investments — and its role in the 2008 financial crash, the consequences of which he says remain acutely felt today. 'I've always been obsessed by that moment and why it happened,' he tells Reuters from Edinburgh, where the show is set to open on July 30.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why tell the story of the 2008 crash now, and why through the Royal Bank of Scotland?
I guess I feel the paralysis that a lot of people feel politically and culturally at the moment. Every 25 to 30 years, the West tends to go through these momentous moments of reset and rebirth. A new contract emerges from the collapse of one era and you arrive at a consensus in another one, whether that's World War II or the fall of the Berlin Wall. That didn't happen in 2008. It felt like we limped through the crisis and no new idea, no new proposition, emerged. Seventeen years on, we're still living in the shadow of that huge crisis — whether that was the decade of austerity in the UK or the stagnation in our politics (and) our public life that led to Brexit or (Donald) Trump in the U.S.
I can't take any credit for the Scottish angle. The National Theatre of Scotland came to me to suggest the frame of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was at the time the biggest bank in the world (and) therefore needed the biggest bailout. Brian Cox came onboard and suggested that if we're going to do it as a Scottish story, to go all the way back to the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith and the birth of this idea of free markets and modern-day capitalism.
What was your experience of the crash like?
I just moved to London. I was in my early 20s and I was finding my feet. I was very economically insecure, doing lots of part-time work in bars and factories and warehouses, trying to make my way as a writer. So I remember feeling quite a selfish, immediate fear. We'd been promised that this was the end of history and that everything was inevitably going to be a linear advancement towards progress and improvement. I remember having a visceral reaction — what is this going to mean for the arts, for theatre? I had no idea the longer, bigger crises and anger that was going to be coming down the line.
It felt like a very American story: Lehman Brothers and images of people walking out of downtown Wall Street with boxes in their hands. I never saw Edinburgh Castle or Arthur's Seat or statues of Adam Smith, and I think that (Edinburgh) really was the epicenter of this — certainly for the UK, but for the world. All roads now, to me, clearly lead to that city.
You credit Cox for bringing Adam Smith into the show. How does he feature?
When he first said Adam Smith should be in it, we were having dinner, and it was the first time I'd ever met him. I didn't think he meant literally; I just thought it was Adam Smith's ideas, and I was like, well yeah sure, he's the father of modern economics. Of course he's going to be in it. And he went: 'No, no — in it as a character, and I want to play him.'
I like looking at systems and processes and making sense of them in quite a literal, often humdrum way. So having this sort of magical quality in what I thought was going to be a play about corporate banking in Scotland immediately shocked me but rocked me in a great way. It expanded it into something slightly more operatic and gothic and mythic, and I think Edinburgh demands that in a way. It's a city full of ghosts; it's haunted. Its neoclassical architecture demands a drama of scale and of opera and of theatre. So I ran off with that and thought well of course, I can have Adam Smith appear as a ghost that's going to torture (former RBS chief) Fred Goodwin and challenge him about whether Adam Smith's ideas about markets and government regulations and capital and wealth have been misappropriated and weaponized. It's Dickensian, it's Greek. Edinburgh as a canvas gives you that permission to do something quite overtly theatrical. I was really grateful that Brian gave me what I thought initially was a really shit idea because it liberated me from men in suits talking about CDOs and futures.
How do you think Scottish audiences will receive this story?
I think about that a lot because the people in Edinburgh have to necessarily be a kind of character in it. I come from a mining village in Nottinghamshire of which there was one single industry and that was the mines and the pits. And when they closed, it felt like everybody was a character in that story, whether you worked down the pit or didn't. And it got to the point in which RBS — as a lender and a creditor but also as an employer and a symbol of Scottishness and of Edinburgh — turned the capital of Scotland into the capital of capital. It meant everybody was involved in that story, possibly in an uncomfortable way. Like all of us, we asked the question: In what way were we all complicit? Clearly, this was too good to be true and no one questioned it and we were very happy to take those mortgages when they were available to us. I'm fascinated to see the response from people in that city. I hope this is an empathetic way to look at what people understandably find a quite difficult chapter in their history.
After dramatizing the works of Parliament, England's Football Association (FA), and now the banks, which institution do you think is the most broken?
It's certainly not the FA. What I find really inspiring about the (former England manager) Gareth Southgate story is it's almost the one singular example I can find in our national life over the past 10 years where an individual or a group has gone into a place and recognized its flaws and its weaknesses but also seen its potential and its opportunity. I know he's got his detractors because he didn't win the World Cup, but he took something that everyone was feeling really bad about and that was in a pretty constant decline and went on the most successful regeneration that's ever happened in its history, and he did that by telling a better story about ourselves.
I find it fascinating that (UK Prime Minister) Keir Starmer used a lot of Gareth Southgate's language when he tried to come into power. I think he sees in Gareth Southgate's language this idea that we need to write a new story. I think Keir will be the first person to say that even though he recognizes that's the challenge, what that new story is (has) yet to be identified, and I think that's the case across our institutions. I look at every other part of our national life when it comes to government, our news, or our culture and certainly our finances — none of it feels like it's able to reset and regenerate.
What role do you think theatre plays in shaping public conversation today, particularly amid so much division?
The thing that frightens me the most, which feels so insurmountable, is the fundamental threats to reality itself. Every other challenge, whether it's foreign policy or domestic policy — I think, well, we can probably tackle all that. But the thing I don't know how anyone even begins to fix is the shift in a commonly accepted reality amongst all of us.
The real superpower of theatre, of course, is (that) it demands physical proximity in a space and you just have to be one community and you have to turn your phone off for two-and-a-half hours and share a reality. Theatre demands we see the same thing together and I think that's so socially important, probably more important than it's almost ever been.
'Make It Happen' is billed as a fictionalized satire. What does humor allow you to do that drama doesn't?
It's historically a very effective weapon in liberating the tension from something and giving you permission to breathe as an audience. All these moments, especially this one, have a real human cost to it — whether it's your pension that you lost or your job or your small business or your reputation. But there are always natural absurdities in these stories as well, especially when they're of that scale. The hubris of it, the size in which that bank grew itself seems so obviously reckless now. There is a natural absurdity to the human foibles and the human condition that I think it's almost kinder to laugh at and roll your eyes at ... We do need to be able to laugh at ourselves, even if it's through grimaces and winces.