Make it Happen – Will the real Adam Smith please stand up?

#theatre

There must be a point where history becomes culture. When the cultural artefacts by which we choose to remember an event overgrow it to such an extent as to obscure it. It seems this is what has happened to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. The shock, despair and anger of those times have long since dissipated, while we continue as if nothing has happened in our Eternal Present, and cultural commentary on the Crash has been safely defanged for consumption as mere entertainment.

The immediate aftermath of the Crash saw a flurry of books, movies and documentaries trying to make sense of what happened and, maybe more importantly, what didn’t happen afterwards. These were followed by plays, such as the The Lehman Trilogy. Premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival this year Make It Happen is a play in the same tradition about the meteoric rise and fall of Royal Bank of Scotland and its CEO, Fred Goodwin.

Make It Happen follows the pattern of a Greek tragedy (complete with chorus) where the protagonist’s downfall results from a combination of hubris and the transgression of divine and/or social laws. We follow Fred Goodwin – played by Sandy Grierson – as he takes over as CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland and propels it from a provincial and sedate Scottish bank to a global behemoth, only to watch it all fall apart as the overextended and overleveraged RBS becomes one of many casualties of the Great Financial Crisis, only rescued through government intervention. Notwithstanding the obvious banker tropes (sordid affairs and cocaine fueled nights out), Goodwin’s fall from grace develops subtly over the course of the play. Grierson’s Goodwin is first of all an outsider: to banking (he is an accountant), to Edinburgh (he is from Paisley) and to the milieu of Edinburgh (he has a working class upbringing). It is this outsider status that gives Goodwin the edge. Not only is he more ambitious and unconstrained by the mores of the Edinburgh gentry, but he also has a firm grasp of detail and opportunity. His first coup is the takeover of the much larger NatWest, sensing both the weakness of their balance sheet and the decadence of its management.

Victory, however, comes at a price, and as the play progresses, Goodwin slowly turns into the stereotypical banker he initially despises: arrogant, hedonistic and disinterested in details. After deciding to move RBS out to a white elephant of a campus outside of Edinburgh, Goodwin lavishes more attention on the removal of a tree marring his view than on the toxic assets that RBS accumulates. Erstwhile scrutiny and detailed instructions of his underlings give way to a singleminded mantra: make it happen. The callousness though, was always there, grounded in a social Darwinist reading of Goodwin’s hero: Adam Smith.

An Adam Smith who, played by Brian Cox like a self-conscious ghost of Christmas past, makes an appearance when Goodwin finds himself stressed or frustrated. Smith acts as the foil to Goodwin’s hardcore neoliberalism, reacting with puzzlement, denial and outrage to Goodwin’s repeated invocations of Smith as the justification for his dog-eat-dog capitalism. The scenes where an exasperated Smith queries if Goodwin has actually read The Wealth of Nations or ‘his other book’ (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) are solid, if at times predictable, comedy, carried by the two excellent actors and their interaction. Yet for all the dramaturgical fireworks, these scenes expose the fundamental limitations of a liberal analysis and critique of the causes of the Great Financial Crash.

By centring Goodwin as the hubristic yet misguided banker, Make it Happen implies that the causes of the 2008 Crash are to be found in greedy bankers and a misunderstanding of Smithian economics. The repeated exhortations by Smith to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments feel addressed as much at the audience as at Goodwin. ‘If only we had read Smith properly,’ the play seems to say, ‘none of this would have happened.’ Presumably though, economists (and bankers) do know how to read, and yet not only do we hear precious little about Smith’s hostile views on monopolies, there is a veritable industry devoted to maintaining the hegemony of the economic model Goodwin so fervently beliefs in. This includes an actual institute named after Adam Smith which has the express purpose of furthering the neoliberal economic model that, if Make it Happen were to be believed, Adam Smith himself would be appalled by.

Make it Happen follows the common liberal mistake that ideas drive history, and hence that progress is achieved by replacing erroneous ideas with better ones. We saw this same weakness in Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists. Yet as the fellows at the Adam Smith Institute would probably be the first to admit, it is having power to disseminate your ideas and make them hegemonic that really matters. The rest is just moralising.

Moralising can still make for an evening’s entertainment, but morality without power denies us the catharsis tragedy promises. As the real Adam Smith said (in his other book): “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Goodwin is no modern Pentheus or Agamemnon – he may have lost his job and knighthood, but retains a comfortable retirement package. Meanwhile, over 300,000 people have died in the UK alone as a result of the austerity imposed to repay the ballouts of the banks. The exasperated lament by the play’s Gordon Brown that those who caused the crash should have been dragged away in handcuffs can count on a sympathetic hearing by the audience. But our collective knowledge that this didn’t happen only underscores our impotence, and voids the play of accusatory power. If after nearly twenty years it is still the financial sector laughing all the way to the bank, then really the joke is on all of us.

Notes & suggestions