Scotland the Broke

It might seem strange for a satirist who set out to write about the credit crunch to end up setting his play at the turn of the 18th century, and to place the heart of the action in the jungles of Panama. And at first, when Alistair Beaton was asked to write something for the International Festival, such distant events were far from his mind. He thought he would write “a contemporary political satire of some kind”. That, after all, was how he made his name. In the 80's he wrote sketches for Spitting Image, while two of his plays from the last decade—Feelgood and Follow my Leader—were a vital contribution to the artistic response to the Blair years. In them he sent up the world of spin, and turned the political tragedy of Iraq into pitch-black comedy – years before anyone had heard of Malcolm Tucker.

But as he looked for a way to turn the financial crisis into art, he had “a vague memory from schooldays in Glasgow of something called the Darien adventure”. He pursued this inkling with days spent in Scotland's libraries and archives, and a growing feeling that this story of financial folly and imperial hubris was the story he had to tell.

Darien was the name of Scotland's one and only overseas colony, on the isthmus of Panama. The expedition was a tragic failure. Not only did the majority of the settlers die trying to build an empire to rival England's, but so much of Scotland's capital had been invested in the scheme—the money of ordinary people, raised in town halls across the country—that the resulting crash brought about the union of Scotland with England. Like a bank on the brink of liquidation, Scotland had to be bailed out. In the end the English came to the rescue, but the terms of the deal included being ruled by Westminster – the 1707 Act of Union. Beaton reckons that the psychological effects of this shock continue to shape Scotland's relationship with its southern neighbour. “Scotland's last chance of being a big independent nation was blown with Darien. And I think the Scots' resentful attitude towards England can be traced back to this earlier loss of confidence, this huge national shame and humiliation.”

At the heart of the play is William Paterson, the venture capitalist who raised the money for the scheme. He was a man of fantastic charisma, the Richard Branson of his day. He told his countrymen he could make Scotland a great power, and they turned out their pockets for him. “People were staggering down the high street,” says Beaton with relish, “pissed out of their heads, singing 'good old Paterson'.” Such catastrophic optimism, he continues, is “the key echo with today. This mass euphoria, the belief that there's a one-way ticket to getting rich”. The illusion claimed the lives of almost 2,000 settlers, Paterson's own wife among them.

This grand collapse is more than a parallel of today's financial crisis: it was its ancestor. Darien was an early example of a massive wager made with the money of luckless investors, and in that sense “it marked the beginning of modern capitalism”. The Royal Bank of Scotland—“that much-loved institution”—was set up after the Darien disaster, as the vehicle to pay of disgruntled investors. Its collapse in 2008 brought the story full circle.

The connections with today were so clear that Beaton's biggest worry seems to be that they might get in the way of the story. Take one scene in Edinburgh, “where you see the people responsible for this disaster being amply rewarded for their accomplishments. My challenge is how to write it without the audience thinking I made it up! I want to let the echoes of modernity ring out without the play turning into a vehicle to thump today's banks. Not that they don't need thumping.”

“This is a narrative that demands telling”, Beaton tells me, and it is this faithfulness to history which makes Caledonia more than just a credit crunch play, even if that was what he set out to write. Yes, it has a lot to say about the misplaced optimism behind every doomed financial fad, from the South Sea Bubble to the Enron scandal. But thanks to Beaton's eye for period detail, Caledonia promises to shine most as an evocation of the time. He tells me enthusiastically of the contemporary songs he reworked for the stage – the bawdy sea-shanties the sailors sung on their way to South America, the drinking songs written in honour of Paterson at the delirious height of his popularity. And in contrast there are the scenes of the appalling disaster in Panama, “where the play dips down into darkness.”

Writing a historical play was a new venture for Beaton, and maybe he won't write another. He writes best about the follies of the very powerful, and judging by the sadness and disgust with which he talks about current politics (“what we're seeing is the slow dismantlement of the welfare state”) it's clear that he doesn't feel short of material. And then there's the feeling that Caledonia might be a one-off, the perfect story for Scotland in 2010. So it's good thing that the right person to tell it was in school the day his class was taught about the Darien venture.