MARK FISHER evaluates the National Theatre of Scotland’s flagship summer show.

TO ENJOY theatre you must suspend your disbelief. You have to accept these are not mere actors stomping around a stage, but real characters at large in the world. For a play to work requires a collective act of faith.

The same can be said of the financial system. It might seem counterintuitive that money will follow money, that the financial markets can create wealth out of wealth, but as long as everyone goes along with it, the results prove it is true. Only when faith wavers and doubt sets in do bubbles burst and markets crash.

That is why the setting for Caledonia is a stage. In this National Theatre of Scotland production, which previewed at Eden Court in Inverness before its high-profile run at the Edinburgh International Festival, the action takes place behind the footlights on a set of wooden scaffolding like an old-style music hall.

Under the direction of Anthony Neilson, the actors strike deliberately stagey poses, their arms held aloft, their faces turned out to the audience. If you can believe this melodramatic posturing, the show seems to say, then you might also have once believed Scotland was capable of funding a colonialist adventure to the Isthmus of Panama (then known as Darien) in the late-17th century without nearly bankrupting itself.

History proved the attempt to establish a colony in this inhospitable territory to be a disaster.†It led to the loss of 2000 lives and left Scotland so financially crippled that it could do little to resist the act of union with England a few years later.

As playwright Alistair Beaton sees it, the whole affair could not have happened without the kind of collective delusion, the faith in creating something out of nothing, that led to the near collapse of the global banking system in 2007–08. His play is at its satirical best when it makes such connections across the centuries, reminding us that in times of financial folly it is the ordinary people who suffer the most.

The chief actor in this story of blind faith is William Paterson, the Scottish financier who dreamt up the Darien Scheme and raised an unprecedented amount of cash from all levels of the population. Played by Paul Higgins, he is a coloured-in figure in a black-and-white world, a charismatic orator whose every gesture is imitated by his audience as if there were magic in his very movements.

By the end, when his scheme has been defeated by disease, mangrove swamps and the uncooperative English, his actorly poses command no authority. His people are no longer prepared to suspend their disbelief. The bubble is burst.

The approach gives Neilson the excuse to fill the show with a heightened air of theatricality. It is brimful of quirky dances, silly songs and visual gags. This makes for a lively and entertaining evening, as indeed does Beaton's satire, but sometimes it feels as if the director's tricks are compensating for the duller moments of the script.

Caledonia makes an important contribution to our understanding of Scottish history, even if its vision of a nation run by parochial toon cooncillors seems unreasonably full of self-loathing, but from a dramatic point of view, it is occasionally overburdened with information and the production's smoke and mirrors don't always cover up the fact.

© Mark Fisher, 2010

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