Make It Happen is a portrait of a bullying control freak, Fred Goodwin, who turned RBS into the largest bank in the world until it came crashing down in 2008. Fred the Shred’s character makes him a tough subject for a drama. His morning meetings were called ‘morning beatings’ by terrified staff. He ordered executives to pitch him an idea in the time it took him to eat a banana. Inciting arguments between staff amused him and he once sacked an employee for saying ‘I tried’ instead of ‘I succeeded’. He was obsessed with colours and fabrics and he personally oversaw the design of the carpets and even the handwash at the bank’s headquarters.
But James Graham’s play offers us very few clues about the origins of his character flaws. We learn nothing of Goodwin’s childhood or his family, and his romantic side is confined to a hasty fling with a female employee. All we see are the outward workings of his soul. And it’s ugly. It’s also suburban. He’s just another corporate hyena who happens to roam across an exceptionally broad hunting ground. As a person he’s as much fun as a Dalek.
The story is told through his relationship with the upbeat Alistair Darling and the morose, brooding Gordon Brown (Andy Clark) whose personality seems eerily similar to Goodwin’s. At times, Brown threatens to take over the drama. Lurking in Goodwin’s office is the spirit of his mentor, Adam Smith, played by Brian Cox. It’s hard to play a ghost on stage because the undead have no stake in real-life events, and Cox portrays him as an amusingly cantankerous buffer who reacts with outrage when he learns that his legacy has been misappropriated by greedy bankers. He wants them to read his other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but Goodwin has never heard of it.
Cox works well with the excellent Sandy Grierson who plays Goodwin as a slippery, hateful toad. The script is a little over-busy and it keeps flitting from one genre to another. Bits of history give way to snatches of drama and dance routines. There are communal songs, displays of video graphics and amusing props for parodies of TV game shows. But it seems perfunctory rather than dazzling. The production feels like a town-hall pageant designed to give employment to every artisan and mummer in the district. The level of ambition is low and the actors have to deal with a scruffy set composed of platforms, wooden steps and boxy angular backdrops. Lazy work. The crowd in Edinburgh seemed to like this show without loving it. That’s about right.
Palestine: Peace de Resistance is a one-man cabaret by Sami Abu Wardeh who was brought to Britain from Kuwait as a kid and raised in Battersea. His Palestinian father taught him Arabic and he learned English from his Liverpudlian mum. He’s a gifted performer with lots of personality and he uses the conflict in Gaza as a pretext to showcase his many talents. He dances, sings, plays the guitar and does pretty good bird impressions too. His parody of a Spanish flamenco artiste is spot-on. He links his material very tenuously to a history of anti-colonial uprisings across the world but he says little about Palestine itself, except ‘free Palestine’. Britain seems to infuriate him. So does British history. ‘I am here because you were there,’ he yells accusingly at the crowd, finding them guilty of actions committed before they were born by governments they didn’t elect. Sami is luckier than most because he has the option of settling overseas in a region more closely aligned with his outlook. But he prefers Britain. Good for him.
Another professional malcontent, Katie Boyle, recounts her tribulations as a white migrant in America. She dislikes her mother, Catholicism and Ireland where she was born and raised. She moves to America where she dislikes Republicans, Texas and Arizona which ‘is full of coloniser energy’. Right-wing Americans amuse her because ‘they hate gay people even though they dress
like them’.
This is a puzzling production. The title refers to Roe vs Wade which suggests a show about the politics and morality of abortion. Instead, it’s a list of incoherent grievances. With Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Boyle foresees America ‘sinking into fascism’. At the very same moment she applies for US citizenship. Is she complicit in the political trend she affects to disparage? Better not ask.
Another political tribunal at Monkeypox Gospel. A camp New Yorker, Ngofeen Mputubwele, finds Belgium guilty of spreading the disease across the world. He tells us that monkeypox was incubated in the Congo by hungry locals whose diet of bushmeat caused the virus to develop. The first case was recorded in 1970. The Belgians, he adds, withdrew from the Congo 1960. His accusation doesn’t quite add up. Maybe no one will notice.
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