The Wolf of Poyais: infamous Scottish conman revived for Edinburgh Fringe show
Inventor of a fake country, Gregor MacGregor is a conman for our times, says playwright Sam Went
In 1820 Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor returned to London from fighting in the Spanish American Wars of Independence, announcing he had been made King of one of the newly independent countries, Poyais.
MacGregor described Poyais as a land where cash crops grew wild, where gold nuggets could be plucked from the rivers and where the moon shone brighter than anywhere else on Earth. Poyais caused a mania in the nascent stock market, with bonds in Poyais generating the equivalent of £146 million in 2026 money for Gregor MacGregor - an incredible sum for the time.
The only problem, Poyais didn’t exist.
The Poyais Scheme was one of the biggest scams in history. Through it, MacGregor stole millions from investors and hundreds of colonists lost their lives after being “sent to Poyais”. Among those who purchased Poyais bonds were three former Prime Ministers and King George IV. Despite this, the Poyais Scheme is criminally unknown in 2026.
I first learned about Gregor MacGregor and his remarkable - and remarkably evil - story from the Revolutions podcast. Host Mike Duncan released a bonus episode on MacGregor during his series on the Spanish American Revolutions, since MacGregor was a fairly successful General on the Revolutionary side during that conflict. That is, until he stormed out of the Venezuelan Army in a huff because he felt like he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated.
Since then, MacGregor has become an obsession for me. I read everything I could get my hands on about him and started telling anyone who would listen the story of the greatest con man in history. Naturally, as I run a theatre company, I wanted to turn the story of the Poyais Scheme into a play.
Scams have existed throughout history. Ea-nāṣir was lying about the quality of his copper all the way back in the 1750s BCE. But more than ever it feels like we are living in the age of the scam. In the 2020s, scams have moved from one person losing a few thousand francs thinking he’s bought the Eiffel Tower to a load-bearing part of the global economy.
We live in the age where, usually, Silicon Valley creates something of dubious real-world use or even existence, pumping up the speculative value of that thing, or the company selling it, through hype before raking in money from private investors and members of the public foolish enough to buy in. And when reality finally comes crashing down, it’s the general public left holding the bag while the early investors and founders walk away with millions.
Think of Theranos, Enron, cryptocurrency or that technology on the front page of every newspaper. These are scams big enough that the money involved is counted in billions, and when they collapse they present a systemic risk to the whole economy.
This is why we wanted to tell the story of Gregor MacGregor and the Poyais Scheme, to use this historical scam as a way to talk about our modern scam economy.
We present Gregor MacGregor as having travelled from the 1820s to the modern day, telling the story of his life as a seminar of success, teaching our audience how they too can create a financial product just as lucrative as Poyais. But the audience can never be sure if they’re being let in on the ground floor of MacGregor’s next scam or if they’re his next marks.
And, while the framing changes from a country where gold can be plucked from the rivers to some new technology (or pictures of apes) that is definitely the future of art, commerce and everything else, the core of the scam remains the same: the promise of money for nothing in the future, so long as you put your money in now.
The show is funny, dramatic and will leave our audience marvelling at the sheer audacity of MacGregor and his scheme.
Ultimately what our show is about can be summarised by a quote from a pamphlet written about MacGregor during his lifetime: “Beware the man who promises to turn pennies into pounds”.
The Wolf of Poyais, Assembly Roxy, 8.30pm, until 30 August.
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