Vanessa Oltra’s Adam Smith, le Grand Tour is a model of contemporary theatre with a historical focus. Oltra, who also stars, is a professor of economics at the University Montesquieu, Bordeaux and brings academic rigour to an energetic and insightful investigation of the meaning of Adam Smith in the twenty-first century. Staged as part investigative journey, part personal letter to the theorist, the result is a bombastic but deeply emotional inquiry not only into Smith’s work but the limitations of our ability to capture and interpret the past. The play began life when, in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the author was interrupted during a lecture on economics by a student who questioned the author’s right to lecture on free-market capitalism and her knowledge of Smith, asking “And this Adam Smith, do you at least know him?” The inherent tension of this question, if we can ever understand the past and how far do we stray in re-interpreting it for the present, is the theme of the production; the central motif is the padlocked gate that guards Smith’s grave in Canongate kirkyard and the protagonist’s attempt to open it. But for all this tension, Oltra’s journey is immensely humorous and laced with wit, satire, sarcasm, and self-deprecation throughout.

The production sees two contemporary protagonists, Mary and Fred, make their own grand tour, or to be more accurate, pilgrimage, to Edinburgh and Glasgow to follow in the footsteps of their hero. Mary, an academic, played by Oltra in an autobiographical role, is joined by enthusiastic amateur Fred, played with incredible and unrelenting energy by Frédéric Kneip. Their questions to each other are interspersed with video of the pair making their journey through modern Scotland as well as their interviews with members of the public at locations such as Smith’s statute on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. The ignorance of Smith’s life and works demonstrated in these interviews, by locals and tourists alike, is a somewhat lazy and formulaic way of demonstrating the ambiguous meaning of Smith in the modern world. It is, nevertheless, effective and the audience is typically given immense credit during an hour in which very little of Smith’s life is actually discussed.

Those hoping for a history lesson will be left disappointed. This is a contemporary play about contemporary issues and staged as a thoroughly modern analysis of our relationship with the past. There is absolutely no nod to eighteenth-century styles, idioms, or language in the play. What the production possesses in abundance is raw emotion as the protagonists struggle to interpret and understand a man so often held hostage to the needs of the present. As real as their idolisation of Smith is, Mary and Fred possess a visceral frustration with the ambiguities of their hero, who had his personal papers burned before his death in 1790. One of the most humorous moments is watching Fred attempt to recite sections of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in the style of Smith himself, with Mary giving his stage directions drawn from eighteenth-century accounts of Smith’s lectures. The inability of Fred to incorporate all of the suggested elements into his performance serves as a useful short-hand for our inability to understand figures from the past in their historical setting as we continually try to reinterpret them for our own ends. The strength of the play is its very human lamentation on the limits of knowledge and our ability to both invent and forget our relationship to the past.

For all the intelligent ambiguity of the performance, however, the play is itself a victim of some inherent tensions. Despite its reservations about the limitations of knowledge, the political bias of the production is very clear and heavily-weighted toward the definition of Smith as a moral philosopher rather than an economist and “father” of free market thought. One of the opening lines forms part of Mary’s letter to her hero and asks “Do you know Adam … that economics has nothing to do with morals anymore?” It comes as little surprise that of Smith’s works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and, in particular, its section ‘Of Sympathy’, garners far more of the play’s attentions than An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Great delight is taken throughout in exposing the relative unimportance of the “invisible hand” or the self-interest of “the butcher, the brewer, or the baker” to Smith’s overall theories.  Where Wealth of Nations does get sufficient attention, it is on Book V, Section 2, and its argument for the importance of government in maintaining public institutions and for all citizens to contribute to government only in proportion to their ability. The Adam Smith Institute, the free market think-tank that erected the statue of Smith on the Royal Mile, is the butt of many of the plays more caustic jokes as it is taken to task for its narrow interpretation of Smith’s writings. Little criticism of this approach will be heard from many of those who see the production, including this reviewer. As a result of this political bent, however, Smith is treated like something of a hot potato to be passed back and forth between Mary and Fred without being allowed to rest for a moment lest the play’s didactic lessons lose their potency. Oltra is, perhaps, more surprised than she should be by the moral aspects of Smith’s writings. This is perhaps a reflection of her background in economics, where such contextual and cultural questions are less important than in other social sciences. But those with a keen interest in Smith will not be left surprised by any of the play’s conclusions. As Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) or Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Yale University Press, 2010) have made clear, the co-option of Smith’s name by free market advocates in the Chicago school, does a grotesque disservice to the context in which Smith’s works were produced. Far from advocating rampant self-interest and modern free markets, Smith’s views were an idiomatic response to monopolistic and exploitative imperial corporations such as the East India Company. But without such context, a product of the play’s contemporary focus, we are left with a lesson in morality which is, at times, too heavy-handed.

Nevertheless, Adam Smith, le Grand Tour is excellent and deserving of much praise. As a result of a great deal of skill and energy, Oltra has produced an intelligent and humorous play from a topic that does not easily lend itself to theatre. It only makes one anxious for similarly historically-focused productions in the future.

Adam Smith, le Grand Tour runs from 2nd to 26th August at the Institut français d’Ecosse, Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh.