Edinburgh International Festival: Brian Cox play writer 'still hoping' for call from ex-RBS boss Fred Goodwin

Make It Happen tells the story of the near-collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008 and the central role of ex-boss Fred Goodwin.

The writer behind a play starring Brian Cox which charts the downfall of Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin during the credit crunch has said he is still hoping to contact the disgraced former banker.

James Graham, whose latest work Make it Happen is to be performed in Dundee next month before a run at the Edinburgh International Festival, said he had spoken to Scottish bankers, politicians, civil servants and journalists as part of his research - but had not yet heard back from Goodwin.

Graham is also behind plays including Quiz, about the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? cheating scandal, and Dear England, about the struggles and successes of England's football teams, which have both been made into TV dramas. He said he believed his latest work, which he describes as a “story of Edinburgh society”, could also transfer to the small screen.

Graham said the idea of the play, which was conceived jointly by Graham with Cox, director Andrew Panton and the National Theatre of Scotland, had appealed to him due to what he perceived as the ongoing social and political fallout from the 2008 financial crash.

Fred Goodwin was stripped of his knighthood in 2012.

“I knew I still hadn't made sense of that crisis myself,” he says. “It was an anxiety I couldn't quite shift about what it was about that moment that feels like we're still living in the shadow of it. But the specificity of seeing it through the lens of Adam Smith and RBS came from the others.”

He describes the scope of the story of RBS and former chief executive Goodwin’s involvement in the crash as having the potential to be a “16-part Netflix drama in itself”.

The Edinburgh-based bank, which is headquartered at Gogarburn, faced near-collapse in 2008 and was bailed out by the UK government. Goodwin was stripped of his knighthood in 2012.

Graham points to other fictionalised accounts of the crash, such as film The Big Short and Stefano Massini play The Lehman Trilogy.

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“As a writer who really enjoys looking at political systems and the paths we get to where we are today, it just feels like, nearly 17 years on, that we haven't really reset and renewed ourselves from that particular crisis,” he says. “It's the paralysis that we still see coming out of it - intellectually, idealistically - then from austerity to Brexit, to populism to [Donald] Trump.”

A key character in Make It Happen is the ghost of 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, played by Cox.

Graham says: “It delights me, and I find it completely delicious - that the very idea of modern capitalism and free markets and free trade can be traced back to the streets of Edinburgh with Adam Smith 300 years ago. Then there is the horrible poetic delight of [the downturn happening] in that same city in 2008.

Playwright James Graham explores the near-collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland in his new play, Make It Happen. | James Chapelard

“They both gave birth to it, and then nearly saw the end of the same thing in the form of RBS, which by that point was the world's biggest bank and the biggest threat to markets and capitalism as we knew it.

“The neatness of that and going ‘Christ, what is it about Edinburgh that both started the world and nearly ended the world in one fell swoop?’ That just got me so excited.”

He recalls his own fears over the crash, which happened in his early days as an up-and-coming playwright.

“My biggest panic at the time was what it would mean for theatre and for the arts,” he says. “I was sitting watching the Alistair Darling Budget and it was the first time in my adult life where it wasn’t just natural progress year on year with more money going to more people. I’d taken that for granted.

“I’d never lived through a recession before and I thought ‘what’s that going to mean for me?’”

Graham says Make It Happen attempts to portray the “real human cost” to Edinburgh of the time.

“I try to frame it through the lens of Edinburgh - of local shopkeepers and businessmen and smaller auditors and accountants and the butcher, the baker,” he says. “It’s about Edinburgh society and what it did to that community, in terms of the shame, this feeling of disgrace and the embarrassment of feeling suddenly like you're the centre of the financial world and then it all collapsing or disappearing.

“As well, it is the pain of that, the human cost and it's really emotive.”

Graham, who is known for capturing the zeitgeist of well-known events in his work, admits he often becomes close to the people he plans to write about after meeting them in the course of his research.

England footballer Gareth Southgate, whose character features in Dear England, is one subject he has got to know well. Meanwhile, he also counts Quiz stars Diana and Charles Ingram - the couple who shot to notoriety after being found guilty in court of “procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception” during Mr Ingram’s winning Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? appearance - as friends.

Brian Cox plays the ghost of Adam Smith in Make It Happen. | Getty Images

“I find it a real privilege to get to know these people and I actually consider most of them my friends,” he says. “It's always a thrill when Diana Ingram likes one of my Instagram posts and I go ‘but you're a character in my play, that doesn't make any sense’.”

Graham has interviewed a range of key credit crunch stakeholders in his research, including BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg and Shriti Vadera, who was the UK government’s business secretary at the time of the financial crash. However, Goodwin has not responded.

“We try to get in contact with everybody and invite them to speak,” he says. “I can only assume, understandably, [Goodwin] probably won't want to. But for me, that's always a pretty fluid, organic process. So maybe closer to the time, I will reach out harder. And he is welcome to reach out to me.”

Graham’s plays often offer an insight into a more human side to characters based on real people, particularly when many of his audience may already have preconceived ideas about his subject.

“It actually is quite hard with Fred Goodwin,” he says. “He's my protagonist, but most of the world sees him as an antagonist. I would normally have as my central character the heart and soul, the moral conscience of the play - someone who an audience could get behind.

“It’s a different contract when the protagonist is someone who has done great harm and the audience will come, understandably, with a huge amount of baggage towards them. It would be really boring drama if a guy walked on who you hated and then you spent three hours hating him. The audience will understand that we have to do something else, but that it’s not about vindicating him, defending him or exonerating him.”

Graham says he resists the “stringing them up and throwing vegetables approach”. He instead wants to look at Goodwin’s life beyond the public perception of “greed” and the “suites at the Savoy”, which he describes as “quite obvious and surface-level stuff”.

“My job is to try to not satisfy the audience's thirst for blood,” he says. “Instead, I want to create a three-dimensional and even empathetic, if not sympathetic, figure of a human being who has wants and needs and struggles and desires like all of us and who thinks he's contributing to the mass good, even if in hindsight, clearly there were flaws in there. I really want to understand the man and understand the system and the system that he was in.

“I wouldn't presume to speak for him, but I can only assume that he thinks he was a symptom of something that was way bigger than him, culturally, and that he just became the face of something that was systemic across our entire financial system.”

Graham said he had studied Goodwin’s character as far as possible without meeting him.

“He doesn't scream and swear and throw things and bang the table,” he says. “His power comes from a different kind of status, which I find really fascinating. He comes from a working-class background in a council estate in in Paisley and became one of the most successful private people in the world, achieving that capitalist dream of working your way up with a skill.

“There's things there that you can use to help an audience understand what drives him.”

The writer adds: “But it's always tough to negotiate, and you have to treat that responsibility sincerely and and always understand that this is not your story, and it's not your trauma, and it's not your pain, it's someone else's pain. And that might include a very rich and successful and powerful man, or it might include people who've been arguably the victims of a great legal injustice.”

Graham says he believes Make It Happen could eventually be turned into a TV series, adding he would be “interested” to speak to television executives about adapting it.

“It’s certainly got the legs,” he says. “It's not like you would have to eke out the collapse of the global markets to stretch. The drama is there and the colourful characters, the incredibly vivid world of Gogarburn Edinburgh, with the biggest bank on planet Earth at the time. Those characters and those themes are a gift to expand if you could.”