Brian Cox returns to the Scottish stage as Edinburgh festivals begin

It was the banking disaster which brought a Scottish institution to its knees and sent shockwaves around the world.

Now the story of the rise and fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has been brought home to Edinburgh in the major new production Make it Happen.

Veteran actor Brian Cox, who is starring as the ghost of economist Adam Smith, says at the age of 79 he is focused on protest to “give people a better break”.

The “biting satire” may be the Edinburgh International Festival’s most anticipated play, but it’s just one of thousands of shows opening this weekend as the city turns into the world’s biggest arts venue for another year.

Cox is one of 2,000 artists from 42 countries appearing at this year’s International Festival, and there are another 4,000 shows in The Fringe, including 500 not registered in time for the publication of the 2025 programme.

While he played megalomaniac billionaire Logan Roy in TV drama Succession, the actor says his Dundee childhood has given him a focus on the other end of the wealth spectrum.

“People forget their roots,” Cox told me as he joined EIF director Nicola Benedetti for the world premiere of Make It Happen – a collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland, Dundee Rep and the festival.

“Your roots are so important to you, and that’s why I prize my upbringing in Dundee,” he said.

He asked to play the role of the 18th Century Scot, regarded as the father of modern economics thanks to his book The Wealth of Nations.

However, the play suggests it’s an earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that was more representative of his philosophy.

“There’s a line in the play where he says, ‘capitalism, I don’t even know what that means’,” Cox explained.

“He saw himself as a moral philosopher. He did not see himself as other people saw him. It was the conditions in which people lived that concerned him.”

Reflecting on his tough upbringing in Dundee, Cox rejects the suggestion it was “terrible”.

“No, it wasn’t – it was a learning experience. Yeah, it was tough. It was as tough as hell.

“You know, when your dad’s dead when you’re eight, and then you’ve got a mum who goes through a series of nervous breakdowns and has electric shock treatment, I mean, when she goes from a healthy 10-stone down to just over five-stone, you know, it’s just appalling.

“But you live with it. You learn. But you do need people to say, ‘let’s give people the best advantage’. And that is not happening.”

At the age of 79, Cox shows no signs of easing up.

After the play, he will embark on a national tour of a one man show based around his memoir and he has just directed his first film.

Glenrothan – a family drama about a Scots whisky company starring Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson – will be released next year.

“I’m a certain age now,” he admits. “The end is much nearer than the beginning. So I just feel that all I can do is protest.

“I can’t do much more than protest, but I do protest because I believe that we need to give people a better break than we give them.”

Cox first committed himself to this play about the financial crisis several years ago, when Andrew Panton was appointed as director of Dundee Rep.

“We first spoke at the opening of V&A Dundee,” Cox said. “He was keen to return to the Rep and do a play but we didn’t know what that would be.

“Then Covid happened, which put a pause on everything, and we realised we needed a play which would bring people flocking back to the theatre.”

Make it Happen was suggested by Dundee Rep’s chairman Dr Susan Hetrick, who’d worked at RBS just before the financial crisis and is now an expert in toxic culture in the workplace.

“You don’t imagine that you’re going to be working in an organisation, particularly one that was as well regarded as RBS, and 15 years later that you’d be looking at this on stage,” she said.

“How something so successful, that was so lauded by academics and by business schools, could collapse.

“Trying to understand what happened in the organisation, but also within the economy and society, is so important and I think there’s a lot of lessons and a lot of insights that we can take from it.”

At the centre of the play is Fred Goodwin, played by Sandy Grierson.

A former accountant from Paisley nicknamed Fred the Shred, Goodwin was headhunted to RBS to help build the biggest bank in the world.

And for a time, it was. He shifted the bank’s traditional New Town headquarters to a greenfield site at Gogarburn near Edinburgh Airport which housed 3,000 staff, tennis courts, a medical centre and a corporate jet.

“The character that James Graham has written is fascinating,” Sandy said.

“It shifts from the bespectacled auditor to that Reservoir Dogs style, strutting around Gogarburn.

“He’s a product of the times, especially for a working class lad from Paisley.”

It would be easy to present Goodwin, who was stripped of his knighthood but retained his pension, as a pantomime villain. Or as a scapegoat. But Sandy believes the play asks wider questions of society.

“To what extent does it get caught up in a mood and a time? People thought that the bankers in the high finance tribe had solved it.

“They thought it was like alchemy. They were on top of the world until the alchemy came crashing down.”