01-08-2025
He's shredded! Brian Cox delivers a VERY public flogging for Britain's most odious banker
In days gone by there were designated areas in Scotland's capital for public floggings – the Grassmarket for example, or Mercat Cross.
These ritual spankings were administered on behalf of the good people who, in their outrage at transgressions beyond the pale, demanded brutal satisfaction. Few of us may have the stomach for them today.
But a 21st century spanking is taking place nightly in Edinburgh a short walk from the spots where the old ones used to happen. The new location is the Festival Theatre. There's scarcely a spare seat to be had.
Granted, the villain of the piece – a Mr Fred Goodwin – takes his beating in absentia, although he would be welcome to buy a ticket if penitence were his thing, which we know it isn't.
But a spanking is what it indubitably is – two hours and 40 minutes of metaphorical thwacks to the bare bottom of Britain's most odious banker.
And who does the flogging? Scottish actor Brian Cox, for one – appearing as the ghost of economist Adam Smith and tearing a strip off Fred the Shred.
Did we onlookers have the stomach for it? Hell yes. Was there amusement to be had in an early retiree's humiliation before an audience of his hometown peers? We laughed like drains.
When it was over, there was a standing ovation. People left the auditorium smiling, brutal satisfaction delivered. That Goodwin fellow? He had it coming.
Make it Happen – the title of this 'fictionalised satire' by James Graham – is what the former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) chief executive used to say when he was delegating.
It might be responsibility for redecorating the lobby outside his office with £1,000 a roll wallpaper or having fresh fruit flown in daily from Paris.
What he memorably made happen under his own steam was the implosion of a centuries-old bank, the loss of 26,000 employees' jobs and the saddling of the taxpayer with a multi-billion-pound bill.
Then he made his exit stage left happen – along with his six-figure pension pot.
I caught the play's Edinburgh Festival premiere this week, joining almost 2000 others for a delicious form of revenge therapy.
True, not all the charges libelled here are strictly accurate.
There is no record of Goodwin actually leaning on Edinburgh's Lord Provost to persuade John Lewis to give up their flagship Scottish to facilitate the expansion of his city centre empire.
It may be a stretch to suppose Goodwin sacked an underling simply because she had neither Prime Minister Gordon Brown nor Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling on speed dial.
Did Goodwin really tell his mistress 'talk dirty' during stolen moments in flagrante in an office cupboard – and would such dirty talk really have been a stream of banking buzz words? Speculation at best.
But, of course, this is fiction – apart from all the stuff that is horrifying fact.
Indeed, much of the fun here derives from identifying the line between the two. You may assume it fanciful that, at the crazed height of the Goodwin expansionist era, the bank's assets included a graveyard in the American deep south. It really happened.
Is a spot of artistic licence employed in nicknaming the morning meetings with the bullying CEO the 'morning beatings'? Nope. That is how they were known.
It all begins inauspiciously enough when a diffident Goodwin arrives for an interview in Edinburgh with RBS CEO George Mathewson who is looking for his heir apparent.
Awkward and with west coast, working class vowels, he seems a poor fit. To Edinburgh's preening banking establishment he is a coarse outsider from – horror of horrors – a council estate in Paisley's Ferguslie Park.
But Goodwin impresses with his masterplan to stave off takeovers and maintain the bank's proud name: 'To stay independent,' he declares, 'you have to grow …'
And so the madness begins. You may wonder how a financial institution's growth era can possibly be reproduced on a bare stage – even why anyone would attempt it.
Well, having your cast burst into song seems to help. If it sounds bonkers, you soon remind yourself it is no more bonkers than the events being depicted here.
There are ensemble renditions of Adele's Chasing Pavements, of Keane's Somewhere Only We Know and Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out – all contemporaneous with Goodwin's decade of banking megalomania.
And if the song Especially for You – a hit for Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan in 1989 – doesn't quite fit the timeline, you delight in hearing Fred the Shred duet on it with the ghost of Adam Smith anyway.
Can either Brian Cox or Goodwin actor Sandy Grierson even sing? Barely a note. In a play about hare-brained recklessness that seemed somehow the point.
It's the interplay between the pioneering Enlightenment economist and his wrongheaded 21st century devotee that proves the drama's real stroke of genius.
Goodwin orders a flunky to source a first edition copy of Smith's seminal work The Wealth of Nations to take pride of place in the RBS HQ and, after it arrives, so does the author in spirit form.
'Where the f*** am I?' wonders Cox, playing Smith, while Goodwin wonders whether the stress of acquisitions has brought on apparitions.
On discovering he's in the future, standing in the bank where his 18th century savings are lodged, the great man inquires how they are doing.
'What's your account number?' asks Goodwin.
'Four,' comes the answer.
The serious point behind their encounters, of course, is Smith's commentary on the economic vandalism perpetrated in his name by his number one fan.
Oops. It turns out Goodwin has misinterpreted virtually every page of the economic bible and, bewilderingly for the author, embarked on a programme of aggressive capitalism.
'You've got me all wrong,' he says, scandalised at Goodwin's insistence that he is the father of modern capitalism. 'I'm not a capitalist. I'm a moral philosopher.'
It's a devastating take-down, not just of the banker, but of the fanaticism which can grow from the selective reading of seminal texts. The moral? Pay closer attention.
And Cox is superb – a cross between a bumbling great uncle transported to confusing, unfamiliar times and a raging Logan Roy (his character in TV drama succession) driven to distraction by the incompetence of his protégés.
'You f***** idiot,' he snarls at Goodwin as the banking bubble bursts, sounding exactly like his TV media mogul carpeting one of his disaster-prone offspring.
Sensibly, Adam Smith sees the writing on the wall and demands to withdraw his savings.
Gordon Brown delivers his verdict on the banker too. He calls him an 'utter b******.'
Even the mild-mannered Alistair Darling is only marginally less withering.
And, bringing the hubristic tale to grass-roots level, we hear from shareholders. One inquires of Goodwin why his salary is 50 times that of typical staff members when the industry standard is six.
She reappears later to remind him that figure has risen to 120.
It all climaxes, as we knew it surely would, with Goodwin as the demented captain of a vast sinking ship casting around for the billions required to forestall the certain doom which lay only hours away.
We know the rest. The knighthood being wrested from him and – after a struggle – a portion of his pension too. The pariah status that followed and the mea culpa which never truly did.
And the Festival Theatre audiences surely know the rest better than most. This is a play about their home town's recent history. Edinburgh is a compact city.
Goodwin's 'Pleasure Dome' – the flagship branch in St Andrews Square where he did his showing off to the great and the good – is less than a mile away.
Gogarburn, the mini-kingdom he had built a stone's throw from the airport, has passed into city legend: the opulence, the private jet, the ocean going self-indulgence…
Most in Edinburgh are well aware, too, that Goodwin lives among them still – not too long a walk, in fact, from where we sat hooting and cringing at his outrageous excesses.
'What about due diligence?' a subordinate asks him at one point in the drama.
'F*** due diligence,' comes the uproarious response which we must assume falls on the 'fiction' side of the fence.
Except, of course, it now looks broadly true.
An uncomfortable week in prospect, then, for the target of this theatrical spanking. Make It Happen runs in Fred Goodwin's home city until August 9.
If the 66-year-old is currently in residence then his ears must be burning. I'm fine with that. I didn't see anyone who wasn't.
