Almost 16 years after the crash that triggered a global financial panic, The Lehman Trilogy hits Australian stages this month to tell the story of the bank that wasn’t really too big to fail. And if you think you’ve heard it all, not quite: Adapted from Stefano Massini’s Italian text and directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes in this Tony Award-winning production, Ben Power’s play is the story of the family that founded the bank. .
Framed as a corporate thriller, the play opens in midtown Manhattan in an empty boardroom filled with file boxes; While a janitor tidies up the room, a radio rings out news headlines: Lehman has collapsed and the world is waiting to hear whether it will happen. to be released on bail. We then return to 1844 and see the arrival of Heyum Lehmann, the son of a Jewish cattle trader from Rimpar, Bavaria, on the New York docks; ready to lay claim to a slice of the American dream with his newly anglicized name: “Henry Lehman” (Adrian Schiller).
Over the next three and a half hours (three-hour acts with two intermissions) we cycle through the 164-year family saga-filled history of capitalism. Henry’s younger brothers, Emanuel (Howard W. Overshown) and Mayer (Aaron Krohn), join him and together they turn his clothing store in Montgomery, Alabama, into a raw cotton trading post. Wives are taken, children are born, cotton is abandoned for coffee, Alabama is abandoned and moved to New York, the family’s deep-rooted Jewish European identity is erased, and the Lehman Brothers enterprise moves inexorably further away from the buying and selling business. to concrete things and the intangible realm of pure finance. And then the collapse.
On its face, it’s a compelling proposition: the story of American capitalism through the prism of a family business; A story of brothers, sons, fathers and meeting rooms, bearing the scent of Succession but nourished by the initiative of immigrants.
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It’s quite ambitious, of course: Three and a half hours isn’t much time to cover 164 years of family history, let alone a subplot of American capitalism. Italian playwright Massini knew this: His text began life as a radio play, then grew into a five-hour play, then a 700-page novel. But this National Theater production, which premiered in 2018 before moving to the West End and Broadway, has some serious pedigree: Mendes is responsible for such West End and Broadway hits as Cabaret and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice; Power has a form in the adaptation of weighty texts (Paradise Lost) and corporate stories (Enron); and Es Devlin is arguably the best (and certainly most innovative) designer working in theatre.
This A’s team made some smart choices. Power and Mendes retain Massini’s oratorical style, concentrating the story on just three actors initially playing the brothers before moving on to countless other roles with no change of accent, no change of stance or expression, nothing but a gesture. .
The set features a glass box that rotates as a meeting room, where boxes of documents are reconstructed as if they were building blocks, and various names and numbers are written on the walls in pencil and sometimes erased. Behind the stage, a curved, panoramic video screen initially projects scenic and location-based images—New York Harbor, fields of Alabama, the 21st-century New York City skyline—but becomes increasingly abstract and digital as it approaches rarefaction. “pure finance” atmosphere.
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All of this maintains a sense of movement and play that enlivens what might otherwise feel dry. In stripping the flesh of the family saga down to its bones (including stripping out entire chapters of family and corporate history and branches of the Lehman tree), you lose much of what makes Massini’s novel a satisfying human story, and much remains. a breathtaking timeline that zips through major turning points like conversations about trade and capitalist theory and the Civil War.
The performances of this very good trio of actors are the key ingredient; Capturing our attention, bringing vivid life to even fleeting characters, eliciting giggles and warm empathy allows the audience to have skin in this emotional play.
However, the project is flawed. At its core, this is a story of mostly white men behaving badly. The women barely shape up, and when they do, they are thinly drawn and funny: a coquettish defined by the color of her dress or the style of her hat; a dull but dutiful wife; a resentful, harangue wife. Most of the play’s requisite laughs come from men playing caricatures of women.
Then there is the decision to tell the story of capitalism in America without slavery; something that American critics rightly called out when the play was transplanted here, leading to minor, unsatisfying changes (one of the Lehmans’ neighbors drops by in Act 1 to say that slavery is bad before disappearing into a smoke of deus ex machina). This is the story of capitalism, which spends more time telling us about the individual stockbrokers who took their own lives on the first day of the Great Depression than the millions of Americans who died to build the nation’s wealth.
As a family saga, the Lehman Trilogy lacks meat and stakes; As a story of American capitalism it feels incomplete and too lightly sketched.