Brian Cox: ‘I’ve been haunting Margaret Thatcher’

He was a major player in the global financial collapse of 2008, who cost the country billions of pounds after becoming a key player in the high-stakes banking cataclysm. Now former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) CEO Fred Goodwin is receiving a punishment many would say fits the crime – being haunted by Brian Cox. And a very angry Brian Cox at that.

“He still has a £700,000 pension, which I think is appalling, and that’s it having been halved. He should have had it taken away from him and now he should be on his uppers, like a lot of people were. A lot of people lost everything because of his actions. They took away his knighthood, but so what? I’m not a great believer in them so that doesn’t make much difference to me, really.”

Cox knows a thing or two about rabid corporate profligacy, having played ruthless media megalomaniac Logan Roy in four series of global smash Succession. But where Roy’s sins were fiction, Goodwin’s grand financial failure was fact, one that millions around the world suffered for, and still do.

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The 2008 global financial disaster saw the RBS bailed out by the government to the tune of £45 billion. Goodwin went on to publicly apologise to MPs while drawing down from his £16 million pension pot. The shamed banker now faces the same supernatural fate delivered to Macbeth by Shakespeare and Scrooge by Dickens.

Award-winning playwright James Graham has delivered Goodwin to the spirit of Adam Smith, regarded as the father of modern economics, played by Cox in a biting satire on the banker’s destructive legacy from the National Theatre of Scotland.

Make it Happen – the slogan of Goodwin’s financial plaything, known to the rest of us as the bank up the high street – will open in Cox’s hometown of Dundee before transferring to the Edinburgh International Festival.

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The idea of Goodwin vs Smith, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment of 1700s Edinburgh, was one Cox himself had a hand in.

“When Fred takes another wrong turn, which he does many times, I pop up and correct him, bully him, make fun of him,” Cox says. “I suggested the character of Adam Smith should be included. I was sick of Thatcher misquoting him all the time, big time, so I wanted to redress the balance.

“There’s one point in the play when I meet Gordon Brown [PM at the time of the collapse] and I tell him I’ve been to see Thatcher and haunted her too, because she got it completely wrong. She constantly misquoted him.”

Smith’s books, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, are regarded as cornerstones in the study of modern philosophy. Cox “dipped into” the books to prepare for his role.

“The Wealth of Nations is 900 pages, and there’s not enough time to read that,” he says. “But I’ve dipped into Moral Sentiments, which is not 900 pages long, and is much more about moral responsibility.

“The relationship between the two books is very important. Smith regarded Moral Sentiments as his magnum opus and said the two needed to be regarded together.

“There was no moral sense in what Goodwin was doing at all. It wasn’t necessarily immoral, but it was certainly amoral. His self-regard was ridiculous. The man was unbelievably self-serving.

“James Graham’s script is brilliant, he has treated it like a Greek tragi-comedy, there’s a lot of singing in the play, musical interludes. And the end is actually really moving, as it’s an homage to the people who survived it. It’s also a play about Scotland, and how Scotland was traduced by Fred Goodwin.”

Goodwin isn’t the only recipient of Smith’s ire. Playwright Graham has taken aim at Sandy Stoddart’s grand statue of philosopher David Hume, whose toe has been rubbed into a high shine by the thousands of tourists who touch it for good luck on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile every year.

Hume is portrayed in the garb of an ancient Greek philosopher. “Smith is fascinated by modern Edinburgh,” says Cox. “He goes to visit David Hume, sitting there with everyone rubbing his toe, and asks what’s he dressed like that for. He says you’d more often than not find Hume pissed falling off his chair, than sitting in it.”

The production will see 79-year-old Cox return to his hometown, where he first stepped on stage at the Rep in The Dover Road, aged just 15.

He says: “Theatre, especially in those days, was always a very middle-class pursuit. In Dundee they used to call the audience who went to the theatre ‘the felties’, which was what they called the women in felt hats. They were fairly middle class. My auntie was very aspirant middle class even though she was working class, and she introduced me to the theatre. I’m always sad that theatre is regarded as a middle-class pursuit. It’s for everybody. It’s inclusive, not exclusive.”

Cox’s Tayside return is bittersweet for the actor – who now lives in London, having recently relocated from the US – in more ways than one.

“My connection to the place has been severed,” he says. “The reason I used to come back to Dundee was because of my oldest sister, Betty, and she passed away a few years ago. So coming back has been sad, because now I want to see her and she’s not here.”

Cox grew up in a cramped tenement with his sisters who helped raise him after his mother suffered a breakdown following the death of his father.

Although Dundee has had a cultural renaissance, with the V&A Museum now a major tourist draw to the city’s waterfront, the city was included in the top 10 of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation in 2020.

“I’m 79 and I’m old enough to remember walking down the high street when [lightweight boxer] Dick
McTaggart won gold at the 1956 Olympics in Australia,” says Cox. “I have this memory of him riding through the streets on top of the tram with his cup. The town was lively then. It was poor, but it had character.

“Now the high street of Dundee is an absolute fucking disgrace, just as it was in the 50s when they started sending people out into the schemes, which had no amenities and nothing to encourage community.

“I lost half my class in 1956 when they all went off to the schemes. I was bereft. This lack of thinking still irritates me and it’s constant.

“I met Dundee’s Lord Provost recently and he told me he wanted to get people back into the city, I told him they should never have taken them out in the first place. The damage that was done is the problem for all these new towns now. You alienate people and effectively put them in open prisons.”

Following Make it Happen, Cox will tour the UK in a one-man show, It’s All About Me!, based around a Q&A format about his career, a contrast he’s looking forward to.

“After learning all the words for Adam Smith I felt I needed to do something that was more relaxed,” he says. “Although if I’m being honest, I feel a little over-exposed with that title.”

Make it Happen runs at the Dundee Rep from 18-26 July and at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 30 July-9 August. Brian Cox – It’s All About Me! tours the UK & Ireland  1 October-4 November.

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