by Almost 16 years after the disaster that sparked the global financial panic, The Lehman Trilogy lands on Australian steps this month, to tell the story of the bank that was, in fact, not too big to fail. And if you think you’ve heard it all, you haven’t: Ben Power’s play, adapted from Stefano Massini’s Italian text and directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes in this Tony Award-winning production, is the story of the family that built the bank. .
Conceived as a corporate thriller, the play opens in an empty boardroom in midtown Manhattan, cluttered with file boxes, janitors cleaning the room and a radio blaring news headlines: Lehman has collapsed, and the world is waiting for hear if it will or not. be rescued. We then zoom back to 1844, and Heyum Lehmann, the son of a Jewish cattle merchant from Rimpar, Bavaria, arrived at a dock in New York, ready to stake his own claim to a slice of the American dream – under his new English name: “Henry Lehman ” (Adrian Schiller).
Over the next three and a half hours – three one-hour acts with two intervals – we will experience 164 years of family saga-cum-potted capitalist history. He is joined by younger brothers Henry Emanuel (Howard W. Overshown) and Mayer (Aaron Krohn), and together they transform their clothing store in Montgomery, Alabama, into a trading post for raw cotton. Wives are found, children are born, cotton is abandoned for coffee, Alabama is abandoned for New York, the family’s deep-seated Jewish European identity is lost, and the Lehman Brothers enterprise moves inexorably further and further away from the business of buying and the sale. tangible things and into the abstract realm of pure finance. And then, the fall.
On the face of it, it’s a compelling premise: a story about American capitalism through the prism of a family business; a story of brothers and sons and fathers and boardrooms that has the app of Succession, but is inspired by the gumption of an immigrant after the boot.
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Sure, it’s ambitious: three and a half hours isn’t much time to tell 164 years of family history—not to mention a subplot of American capitalism. Massini, an Italian playwright, knew this: his text began as a radio play, before evolving into a five-hour play, then a 700-page novel. But this National Theater production, which premiered in 2018 before transferring to the West End and Broadway, has serious pedigree: Mendes is responsible for West End and Broadway hits such as Cabaret and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice; Power has a form in adapting heavy texts (Paradise Lost) and corporate stories (Enron); and Es Devlin is arguably the best (and certainly the most innovative) designer working in theatre.
This A team has made some smart choices. Power and Mendes keep Massini’s free-flowing oratorical style, and focus the story on three actors, who play the brothers at first before devolving into different roles, with nothing more than a change in speech, a change in posture or speech, gestures . .
The set features a rotating glass box-as-board room where document boxes are reconfigured as if they were building blocks, and various names and numbers are written and sometimes erased on walls in marker. Backstage, a panoramic curved video screen projects images that are at first naturalistic and based on location – New York Bay, Alabama fields, the 21st-century New York City skyline – but grow more abstract and digitized as we approach. the rare. atmosphere of “pure finance”.
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All of this maintains a sense of movement and playfulness that enlivens what otherwise feels dry. Stripping the meat of the family saga to its bones (including entire chapters of family and corporate history and branches of the Lehman tree), you lose much of what made Massini’s novel such a satisfying human story, and are left with enough with you of talk about commerce and the theory of capitalism, and a breathless timeline that passes through major milestones such as the Civil War.
The performances of these three very fine actors are the main thing – grabbing our attention, bringing vivid characters to life, and the warm emotions and sympathy that ensure that the audience’s skin is in the emotional game.
The project is flawed, however. At its core, this is a story about white men behaving badly – for the most part. Women hardly make a figure and when they do, they are thinly sketched and comical: a coquette identified by the color of her frock or the style of her hat; his dull-but-dutiful wife; a resentful, tormented wife. Too many necessary laughs in the play are wasted from men playing caricatures of women.
Then there’s the decision to tell the story of capitalism in America without slavery – something American critics rightly demanded when the play moved there, resulting in minor revisions (including a moment of clunking in Act 1 when one of the Lehmans’ neighbors.stops saying that slavery is bad, before disappearing in a puff of smoke deus ex machina). This is the story of capitalism that spends more time telling us about the individual stockbrokers who took their own lives on the first day of the Great Depression than it does about any of the millions of Americans who died building the nation’s wealth.
As a family saga, The Lehman Trilogy lacks meat and stakes; as a story about American capitalism, it feels incomplete and too lightly sketched.
