Oh Caledonia!

Paul Higgins as William Paterson in Alistair Beaton’s Caledonia.

To Edinburgh yesterday to see the flagship indigenous production at this year’s Festival: Alistair Beaton’s play about the Darien misadventure in the late 17th century. For a dramatist this should be much more fertile ground than were the mangrove swamps of Panama for the poor would-be colonists. It was a national adventure swallowing up, by some estimates, as much as half the national wealth which makes it all the more infuriating that Caledonia is both so glib and so very heavy-handed. Leaving the theatre my immediate sensation was one of a great opportunity badly, foolishly missed.

Half-way through proceedings it occurred to me that Beaton considers the attempt to establish a trading colony in Panama a kind of precursor to another more recent Latin American fiasco: the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.