Live at Edinburgh Fringe: Brian Cox and James Graham!

A wet morning at the National Museum turned theatrical confessional

The day began with wind and laughter. Storm Floris had pressed its palm across Scotland, canceling flights and disrupting trains, while a live audience gathered at the National Museum of Scotland to watch a radio show do something unusual: it became a stage for a conversation about banks, myths and theatrical responsibility. Between audience warm-ups and a bespoke choral fanfare by the King's Singers, the morning folded into a distinct Edinburgh shape — equal parts civic reporting and festival spectacle.

How a banking collapse became local myth

At the centre of the conversation was Make It Happen, James Graham’s ambitious retelling of the 2008 financial crisis, staged by the National Theatre of Scotland with Dundee Rep. The play turns the fall of RBS — once the world’s biggest bank — into a national fable, reframing a global meltdown with a Scottish accent. Graham refuses the dry ledger of financial jargon and instead pins drama to character: Fred Goodwin’s appetite, institutional hubris, and the social consequences that still linger in towns and pensions.

The device that made people listen

To make those abstract forces palpable, Graham and the production embrace a surprising theatrical conceit: Adam Smith appears as a moral and sometimes comic presence — a ghost and a critic who has to confront how his ideas were reinterpreted across centuries. Casting Brian Cox, who plays Smith as part philosopher, part camp conscience, is a deliberate move toward humanising the history of ideas and interrogating the way national myths enable corporate power.

Theatre as a moral theatre of finance

There is a paradox at the heart of the project. Scotland is celebrated as the birthplace of modern capitalism; it also birthed a bank whose collapse reverberated globally. The play finds drama in that contradiction, staging the financial institution’s rise — with its Versailles-like headquarters and a corporate village that kept employees insulated — as both triumph and tragedy. On stage, the bank's architecture becomes a tableau of hubris; its culture, an engine of groupthink.

Why empathy matters in public stories

Graham’s approach rejects caricature. Instead of presenting Fred Goodwin as a pantomime villain, the play asks what he believed he was doing and why. That insistence on nuance — on imagining the most generous version of a controversial figure — is a reminder of theatre’s unique function: it can ask audiences to sit with complexity for a sustained time, to trade the rapid outrage of social media for proximity and reflection.

Practical craft: turning finance into drama

Translating financial instruments into theatrical stakes means finding human levers: wants, fears, and obsessions. Graham’s dramaturgy locates those levers in the relationships and the moral dilemmas confronting leaders and workers alike. A Greek chorus lends the story its mythic cadence, while music and oddball touches — Adam Smith discovering John Lewis for the first time — keep the show lively and indebted to the Fringe’s capacity for mixing high and low culture.

Festival life, economics and cultural access

Between conversations about the play, the discussion moved to the practicalities of festival life: rising ticket prices, soaring rents in Edinburgh and the squeeze that a global festival places on working artists. The argument made here is blunt: when housing and logistics escalate, creative economies strain. Producers and playwrights noted that accessible programming requires structural intervention so theatre does not become exclusively for the affluent.

Making space for new voices

Both Cox and Graham spoke as veterans and mentors. Their advice to emerging artists was straightforward — persistence, focus, and a refusal to chase trends. The Fringe remains a rare form of cultural democracy because it allows anyone to mount work; but that democracy is under pressure from market forces that can render important new plays invisible. The practical remedy they suggest is old-fashioned craft: write the long play you care about and stage it with commitment rather than chasing short-term approvals.

National identity and the theatre’s civic role

There was a larger civic conversation threaded through the event: Scotland’s complicated relationship with capitalism, its cultural contribution disproportionate to its size, and the political debates about independence and federalism. The play acts as a cultural mirror, asking how a small nation responsible for seminal inventions and Enlightenment thought could also be the site of near-economic catastrophe. That tension made the festival performative in more ways than one; it was a public rehearsal for questions about accountability and pride.

Performance, politics and the audience’s place

Throughout the morning, the live format underlined one lesson: theatre is a place where political questions can be spatially held. An audience’s laughter, silence, or shock becomes part of the text. With the city buffeted by weather and logistics, the gathering itself felt like an act of civic resilience. When actors and writers talk about artistic duty, they point to a responsibility that is practical, ethical and aesthetic — to make work that interrogates power without flattening complexity.

Small theatrical choices with big consequences

From a whimsical Kylie Minogue number to an imgaginative reanimation of Adam Smith, the production’s eclectic choices are not theatrical gimmicks so much as strategies to translate immaterial systems into felt human consequences. They remind the audience that ideas travel unevenly through time: philosophy becomes policy, policy becomes architecture, and architecture alters lives.

The final note to carry forward: the intersection of history, finance and theatre in Edinburgh makes a case for the stage as civic ledger — a place where national stories are contested not by headlines but by human attention. When myths collide with material harms, the most useful response is neither simple condemnation nor nostalgic celebration, but a willingness to look hard at how institutions shape the everyday and to fashion narratives that compel both empathy and accountability.