Towering performances recall the Blairite era of Cool Britannia

The Herald Scotland

03-08-2025

Make it Happen
****
Oasis playing their festival busting Murrayfield next week as the Edinburgh International run of James Graham's play about the rise and fall of failed banker Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin comes to a close is a glorious piece of synchronicity.
Both are very different symbols of working class aspiration during the Blairite era of Cool Britannia largesse that saw all involved have it large.
(Image: Colin Hutton)
Oasis's hungry anthem of excess, Cigarettes and Alcohol, even has a lyric that shares the title of Graham's play that becomes Goodwin's mantra for success.
The difference between Oasis and Goodwin, of course, is that while one is returning to Edinburgh as conquering heroes, the other was at the centre of the 2008 financial crash after a banking institution was destroyed overnight .
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Graham's play charts how a ruthlessly driven boy from the same Paisley housing estate as John Byrne and Gerry Rafferty put his faith and whatever assets were going into Kirkcaldy born philosopher Adam Smith's notion of a free market economy.
As his missionary zeal saw him become man at the top of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Goodwin dragged a rather dull institution into the twenty-first century as a bigger, shinier brand that was willing to gamble everything, including its customers' money, on having the whole world in Goodwin's hands.
Graham, director Andrew Panton and a cast of sixteen led by Sandy Grierson as Goodwin and Brian Cox as Smith render this real life fable as a suitably extravagant satire for the flagship of EIF's theatre programme.
There are mass chorales of pop songs accompanied by movement director Emily Jane Boyle's wilfully cheesy dance routines.
These are played out on Anna Fleischie's set of skyscraper-like boxes onto which Lewis den Hertog's video design puts even more gloss on things as the bombast of Martin Lowe's score powers out.
In a nod to Edinburgh's festival season, a comic corporate presentation resembles A Midsummer Night's Dream's Mechanicals as rendered by a student Fringe troupe.
If the high rollers' sharp suited song and dance routines show off stylistic shades of Lucy Prebble's play, Enron, which dramatised the early 1990s American financial scandal, Panton's co-production between EIF, the National Theatre of Scotland and Dundee Rep is just as on the money.
At the production's heart are the two towering central performances by Grierson and Cox. Grierson is in typical chameleon-like form as Fred, presented here as a rather sad, pathetic figure without empathy or morality. Grierson doesn't crack a smile throughout, delivering each line with withering intent.
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If we never find out what truly motivates him, his Scrooge-like demeanour is something of a giveaway. Cox has a ball as Smith's ghost of free markets past who sets the record straight with Fred inbetween buying scented candles from John Lewis.
There is nice support beyond the city slicker types from Hannah Donaldson as Goodwin's in-house lust interest, while Andy Clark plays a convincing Gordon Brown.
Goodwin's fall from grace here makes him a folk devil of our time.
A whiff of Icarus and a cheque-book load of hubris add to his grand delusion in a show in which money can only talk its way out of trouble for so long.