There are a few curious things about Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy.
Firstly, it is an exuberant three-hander that would work as well in a fifty-seat black box. Secondly, despite its discussion of money, trading, offices, it has the lyrical rhythms and poetic contextualising that you might expect from its Italian journalist author. Thirdly, this lyrical evocation of past ambition, so brilliantly narrated by three old world gentlemen, shies away from unpacking its final crisis.
Sam Mendes's production, featuring perfectly executed design from Es Devlin, presents a masterclass in clean storytelling. With each rotation of a glass cuboid the characters inhabit, we observe a change of story, timeframe and personas, as some recede into the background like influential ghosts.
The simple device of filing boxes does the job with equal style and economy as they are built-up, broken-down and scattered like nodes in a financial system that "share a language." The fact that Henry, Emanuel, Mayer and Emanuel’s prodigious son, Edward, wear tailcoats throughout the play’s unravelling is beautifully evocative of nineteenth century sensibilities contending with an accelerated world. Live piano underscoring the narrative from end to end adds pathos and a sense of passing time to the more sterile, corporate scenery.
The sons of the Lehman brothers, show us the changing face of male privilege—Bobby devotes his time to an aesthetic lifestyle of art collecting, horse racing and investing in a burgeoning media industry, hilariously demonstrated when he announces that the firm should invest in a film "about a gorilla" during the Great Depression. When Bobby dies dancing the twist, a whole epoch is brought to life in a few choice moves and words delivered by the triptych, with glee, on fast-forward.
In fact, there is an element of Futurism inherent in the text and packaged in the monochrome glass and black of the production—an element that introduces the audience to modern ‘progress’ in a refreshingly critical way. The brothers’ Jewish recitations to honour deaths and new beginnings provide anchoring contrast to the surrounding fray of money lust.
John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W Overshown are collectively and individually a tour-de-force, with Heffernan leaving a notably strong impression of an ambitious and sensitive migrant consumed with advancing the fortunes of his family. Needless to say, the story world is one of men as economic champions, made clearer by the actors playing the brothers' wives. This serves as a sobering reminder of how the motion to equality follows centuries of patriarchy.
While we are energetically invited into the lives of the Lehman brothers, the meditation on their firm’s role in the final ‘crash’—the recession that brought mass global redundancies and dark humour around the ‘credit-crunch-lunch’—is strangely absent. While this recession is within living memory, and certainly defined the employment struggles of older millennials, its nuances, reasons and implications are still being processed in memoirs and explainers. This post-mortem is as needed as the play’s moving eulogy for the stock market crash of 1929 and the traders who didn’t survive it.
The Lehman Trilogy is a highly successful portrayal of three migrants’ motivation to build, to expand, to monopolise and to endure in an industrialised world that has set that very task. As such, it pulls the audience towards the characters with full emotional sympathy and trust in the play’s lively grammar.
However, it falls short of being a masterpiece at the last hurdle, rushing through the events that led up to a fateful phone call in 2008. It is understandable that the real drama should finish with the last remaining brother’s death. But despite the play running at over three hours, there it little time dedicated to the aspect of their lives that we can, perhaps, most relate to: their legacy.