Alistair Beaton's Caledonia tells of Scotland's disastrous foray into colonialism, and its amazing parallels with today's politics

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 22:03

IT is a story about easy money in a get-rich-quick culture. It is a tale of calamitous financial mismanagement. It involves reckless risk, poor planning and ends up with the economy of a whole country in crisis. Yet the investors most responsible for the disaster get their money back. And then some.

• Alistair Beaton

Ring any bells? It did with playwright Alistair Beaton when he stumbled across the story of the Darien Scheme. The author has spent his career satirising the world of politics, but when he read about Scotland's attempt to set up a colony on what is now known as the Isthmus of Panama, he knew this piece of 17th-century history could hardly have been more topical. "Here is a story that is enormously dramatic and has these extraordinary parallels with today," he says. "It's got issues of nationalism, mass delusion and greed and it's to do with the banks."

Born in Glasgow, Beaton earned his satirical stripes as a contributor to Not the Nine O'Clock News and Spitting Image. He moved on to full-length dramas such as A Very Social Secretary (about David Blunkett) and The Trial of Tony Blair and is regarded as Britain's leading satirist. When the National Theatre of Scotland asked him if he would like to write a play, he assumed it would be something in the same modern-day territory. But the Darien Scheme's combination of bold dramatic action and contemporary relevance proved irresistible.

The affair began with William Paterson, a Scottish financier who wanted to set up a colony on the strategically crucial strip of land between North and South America then known as the Isthmus of Darien. He tried to raise money in London, but the government did not wish to fall out with Spain over claims to the territory. Undaunted, he returned to Edinburgh which was more receptive. "It was partly patriotic fervour and partly a sense that everyone else was getting rich with their empire, so why shouldn't we have one?" says Beaton.

The money Paterson raised was vast. Estimates vary about the relative worth of the 400,000 – much of it 5 investments by ordinary people – but it was possibly as much as half of available wealth. With this, he and the Company of Scotland were able to launch five ships from Leith in 1698 and to charge the 1,200 people on board with establishing New Caledonia.

"Paterson was a man of enormous charm," says Beaton. "Maybe he was the Richard Branson of his age. He sold the whole idea of Darien to the Company of Scotland and he must have been incredibly eloquent because he'd never been there.

"He was a great salesman, not a crook, he was punctilious and obeyed all the rules, but was a figure of extraordinary bravura and also a bit of a bluffer."

Although the adventure would end badly, Beaton was captivated by the majesty of the ambition and the thrilling derring-do required to put such a scheme into action. "What I don't want to say is, 'This is a story about today, but I've hidden it in a play about yesterday', because it is also its own story – and it's a story of incredible boldness, courage and daring," he says. "Nowadays we think twice about staying overnight in a guest house that might not have running water, but then they sailed for weeks to go to a place where it was just routine for people to die every day from fever and disease."

For this reason, the play, which is to be directed by Anthony Neilson, will be as much rip-roaring adventure as it is satirical sideswipe. "First of all, it is better for the audience to draw their own conclusions, so you're not hitting them over the head, saying, 'Look, moral lesson', and secondly, I think it's only fair to the history because it's an extraordinary story. Parts of that story are examples of courage, enterprise and great vision, it's not just a story of greed."

Even the historical detail of the period makes for great theatrical colour. "If you read the diaries of people who were around the Caribbean in the 1680s and 1690s, you realise there was a very thin line between what was piracy and what was an official war between states," he says. "These people who were out there, whether technically pirates or technically representing their nation, they were buccaneers, they were chancers and they were brave."

The problem was not, as you might have expected, resistance from the indigenous population. The locals were relatively accommodating to the incomers. They were not, however, especially interested in the European goods the Scots had brought with them to trade. Matters were compounded by the poor supply of rations from home and an edict which was issued by the king of England forbidding trade with the colonialists.

Not only did they have to contend with severe hunger, but also with fatal illness. With their numbers depleted by a third, they abandoned the colony after only eight months and headed for home. Replacement ships fared no better and by the end of the escapade around 2,000 people had died. "It's a story with hugely tragic dimensions," says Beaton. "It was poorly planned and poorly executed, despite the great courage of people."

He says he would be "astonished" if audiences did not hear the echoes of our own recent banking crisis in the story, not least because the directors of the Company of Scotland got more than their money back while the country was almost ruined. The invention of the joint stock company which appeared to remove the investors' risk was, he suggests, the "credit default swap of the age".

The significance of this colonialist folly goes further than that, however. "It left Scotland so enfeebled, demoralised and financially damaged that it paved the way for the treaty of union in 1707," he says. "Not only was this an extraordinary story of adventure and disaster, it was also one of the key events that led to the end of Scotland as an independent nation."

In this way, the story comes full circle to reflect on our own debates about devolution and independence, a connection that roots this year's EIF theme about New Worlds on home soil.

"Something about the story reflects my own ambivalence about nationalism," says Beaton, who lives in London. "I am both attracted to the idea of an independent Scotland with its own sense of self and I am also repelled by the idea of petty nationalism. That ambivalence is in this story, which is there's a way in which if you're a Scot you can't help looking at it with a degree of pride, followed very swiftly by a degree of shame and embarrassment. On a surface level, nationalism is attractive and on a deeper level, it's quite worrying. I can't bear tartan sentimentality and what I like about this story is it's about the real Scotland, a Scotland that's been poor and has suffered, but has also had energy, pride and conviction."

&#149 Caledonia is at the King's Theatre, Saturday 21 August to Thursday 26 August.

&#149 Supported through the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.