When Misha Glenny ventured into cold-war Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s, wearing the Solidarity jumper his mum had knitted him, he used to smuggle banned books across the border, squirreling them away in corners of train compartments where even the most vigilant security guard would never look. Three decades later, the author and former Guardian journalist is still in the business of smuggling ideas, but now he’s bringing them in our direction, slipping them past oligarchs, mafia bosses and global capitalists who would rather keep their secrets to themselves.
Arriving in Edinburgh for the final week of the fringe, and dressed down in grey T-shirt as he circles the stage, Glenny is like a left-leaning travel agent giving us a Cook’s tour of international hotspots. Sun-seekers will be disappointed to find only drug barons, trafficked women and computer hackers in his choice of destinations. Apologising for not leaping straight into anecdotes about McMafia, the TV drama starring James Norton and Juliet Rylance (series two coming next year), he begins with the contention that there is an inextricable link between organised crime and the international economy.
The sometime BBC reporter makes his case by skipping from the privatised law-enforcement agencies of a free-market Russia to the murder of the former Serbian prime minister Zoran Đjinđjić, from the loadsamoney degregulation of the financial markets ushered in by Margaret Thatcher to the “snakehead” people-smugglers of China. He throws in statistics comparing the numbers killed in the Syrian civil war with drug-gang deaths in Brazil (a quick plug for his last book, Nemesis, as well as figures for opioid overdoses in the US brought about by the unscrupulousness of big pharma.
From Glenny’s point of view, there is little practical difference between the profiteering of organised crime and the venality of the legitimate world; one man’s tax haven is another man’s money-laundering opportunity. He sees nothing so sensible as the decision of the Canadian government to legalise marijuana, bringing a multibillion-dollar trade out of the illegal market. He likes it so much he even plays the Canadian national anthem.
If it’s not quite a theory of everything, it has the seductive power of a conspiracy theory enhanced by the credibility of first-hand reporting. Glenny is there in the favela when he sees a boy nearly outweighed by the automatic weapon he’s carrying, and he’s in the Dubai bar when accosted by a Chinese sex worker. “Can you ever recall a time of such confusion?” he asks, before laying out an argument that is as broad in its global reach as it is straightforward in its analysis. The varied ills of the modern world, he seems to say, are driven by the same economic forces.
Deeply researched and heartfelt, it is the kind of material you can imagine being tackled by Mark Thomas, who would, admittedly, give it more of a theatrical dynamic. Despite the title, and despite Glenny once having played an Ugly Sister opposite RSC director Greg Doran in a student Cinderella, Misha Glenny: McMafia has more in common with a TED talk than a play. Yes, it’s colourfully illustrated with archive footage and, yes, Glenny does do the voices for an animated cartoon about trade deals in Russia, but the strength of the event is in his marshalling of the facts and the measured articulation of a plain-talking argument for complex times.
• At Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
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