Brian Cox Will Star in World Premiere of James Graham's Make It Happen at 2025 Edinburgh International Festival | Playbill

International News Brian Cox Will Star in World Premiere of James Graham's Make It Happen at 2025 Edinburgh International Festival

The satire tells the story of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s role in the 2008 financial crash.

Brian Cox

Succession star Brian Cox will return to Scottish stages for the first time in a decade to head the cast of the world premiere of a new play by James Graham (Dear England).

Entitled Make It Happen, Graham's new play tells the story of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s role in the 2008 financial crash. Directed by Andrew Panton, the drama is a National Theatre of Scotland, Edinburgh International Festival, and Dundee Rep Theatre co-production in association with Playful Productions and Neal Street Productions.

Make It Happen will preview at Dundee Rep Theatre (where Panton is artistic director) in late July and at the International Festival July 30-31 before officially opening at the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival's Festival Theatre August 1 for a limited engagement through August 9.

The satire, a mixture of characters and incidents inspired by real-life events, with others imagined, casts Cox as Adam Smith, the pioneering Scottish economist and philosopher. Additional casting will be announced at a later time.

Cox is a two-time Olivier winner for his performances in Rat in the Skull and Titus Andronicus. Film credits include Braveheart, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and The Bourne Identity. He is also a supporter of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

In a statement writer Graham said, "Like many writers, an Edinburgh stage is the first place ever I dared put a full play in front of an audience. To be invited to join the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival program this summer is an honor and a thrill. And to work with the National Theatre of Scotland, the Dundee Rep, and of course, Brian Cox, whom I’ve been desperate to write for for as long as I can remember.

"We still live in the long shadow of the 2008 financial crash and our inability to reset from that inheritance and its divisive legacies, so it feels right to be interrogating it artistically. But we hope to do so in a show full of music and story, larger-than-life characters, cheeky humor, and some ghosts from Scotland's centuries' long past thrown in as well."

The creative team also includes set designer Anna Fleischle, costume co-designers Fleischle and Angelica Rush, movement director Emily Jane Boyle, musical supervisor and arranger Martin Lowe, lighting designer Lizzie Powell, sound designer Tingying Dong, video co-designers Lewis den Hertog and Fleischle, associate designer Rush, and casting director Stuart Burt.

Click here for more information.

 
Today’s Most Popular News:
 X

Blocking belongs
on the stage,
not on websites.

Our website is made possible by
displaying online advertisements to our visitors.

Please consider supporting us by
whitelisting playbill.com with your ad blocker.
Thank you!