The Lehman Trilogy from The National Theatre ‘is quite simply as good as theatre gets.’ It was for shows such as this that the fifth star was created.
📍The Gillian Lynne Theatre
📅 Until 20 May 2023
💷 From £10
🕖 7:00pm / 1:00pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 3 hours and 20 mins, including two intervals
🎬 Director: Sam Mendes
🖊️ Writer: Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power
🪀 Set Designer: Es Devlin
🎶 Composer and Sound Designer: Nick Powell
🎵 Co-Sound Designer: Dominic Bilkey
🎼 Music Director: Candida Caldicot
🎥 Video Designer: Luke Halls
💡 Lighting design: Jon Clark
🎂 Adult themes 4+ (Under 16’s must be accompanied by an adult)
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet, Audio Enhancement systems available
🎭 Captioned performances: Mon 20 Feb 7pm & Sat 18 March 1pm, BSL Interpreted: Sat 11 March 1pm
🎭 Audio described performances: Mon 27 Feb 7pm, Sat 25 March 1pm
A theatre critic, unsurprisingly, sees a great deal of theatre, the vast majority of which ranges between the twin pillars of very good, to the ridiculously awful. Rarely, oh so rarely, a critic is privileged to witness the sublime, such as the The Lehman Trilogy in the hands of the National Theatre. The fifth star on the reviewer’s pernicious scoreboard was invented for such as this.
Playwright Ben Power’s adaptation of Stefano Massini‘s 2015 masterpiece has been packing the stalls since opening at their south bank HQ in 2018. The original cast, led by Simon Russell Beale subsequently mounted a worthy conquest of Broadway and beyond, but now the play returns to London with a new cast, and a new venue.
This is an epic, spanning 163 years, and listing dramatis personae by the 10’s, but all brought to life by three men: Michael Balogun, Hadley Fraser, and Nigel Lindsay. It takes a name, Lehman Brothers, best known for an ignominious collapse in the 2008 financial crisis, and delves back in time, beginning with Henry Lehman’s (Lindsay) voyage from Rimpar, Bavaria to the docks of New York in 1844.
What follows is a superlative exercise in theatrical storytelling, all told within Es Devlin’s partially glazed cube, a penthouse office suite excised from a glass and steel skyscraper. Behind this, a sweeping cyclorama provides a canvas for Luke Halls to paint a world shifting in time and space, from the expanses of the Alabama cotton fields, to the pinnacles of Manhattan. It’s a minimal, adaptable set exploited for maximum atmosphere.
Power’s adapted script is a thing of joy, a shifting trialogue, as Henry is swiftly joined by younger brother Emanuel (Balogun) and youngest Mayer (Fraser), who together climb from their dry-goods store in Montgomery from provincial mainstay, with a sticky handle, to the pinnacle of the New York finance industry, and a keystone of the American economy. A coequal trinity, each is given space to create memorable characters, their unique voices, and philosophies. Henry – the head, is ‘always right’, Emanuel is the arm, whilst smooth-faced Mayer is the potato – yes, potato – which stops head and arm coming into conflict.
It’s through their eyes, and their embodied descendents’, that we meet the host of characters with whom they deal, from Perfect Hands the Cotton factory owner, to the women they will court. Remaining in their period black suits for the duration, still the three conjure costume, and greasepaint from clever description, and chameleon physicality to inhabit many skins. This isn’t some dry documentary, but a living, breathing adventure, laced with tragedy and comedy, and with a true sense of journey thanks to a revolving set, and evolving backdrop. File boxes become building blocks, one moment stock in a storeroom, now a tall podium, now a tower of Babyl. Marker pen and the glazed panels will create the signs that attend the Lehman name. With neither paint nor wood, still that yellow sign bearing the black letters, ‘H. Lehman’ blossoms in the minds’ eye.
It’s just so clever of Mendes to stage it all amidst the rooms, and periphera of the far future, a ghost of a fateful date in 2008 iand the inevitable conclusion of the tale. There’s no need to exit stage, no additional thespian or technical flourish to wield, just the story, always the story. Mendes and Movement Director Polly Bennett inject a restless energy to proceedings, the trio moving from one carefully crafted vignette to another, the story never failing as transits becomes a thrilling experience in themselves. Lindsay, Balogun, and Fraser aren’t substitutes for a great cast, they are a great cast, thrilled and unbowed by the challenging, relentless pressure to hold every eye from centre stage.
If strong acting, excellent direction, and a sparkling script weren’t weapons enough, The Lehman Trilogy has one more: Yshani Perinpanayagam and her piano. Tucked away in the shadow of stage, there she sits, sountracking the whole production with Nick Powell and Candida Caldicot’s evocative score. Drawing on the brothers’s Jewish heritage, early passages speak strongly of ties to another home and an ancient tradition, elegies which fade with time as profit gradually supplants all other considerations in the minds of later generations.
Later progeny are eased into being, cleverly slipped into their debut scenes to avoid the least awkwardness in shifting actor persona. Rather than feeling forced by necessity, the people in the room always seem just the people needed. Further, not blind to the absurdity of a mostly bearded cast taking the roles of each other’s children, and spouses, the show leans into it it, leaving plenty of room for twinkling eyes and chuckling audiences. There’s just such a lovely lacing of comedy threaded through the entire show, fitting to a story replete with nonogenarian horse fanciers, precocious child geniuses, corporate pirates, and family squabbles fought betwixt boardroom and cabinet office.
Mendes seems to revel in the big characters, and big ambitions, never letting a single one go knowingly undersold. However, neither Powell nor Massini are blind to the Lehman’s blind spots. The slavery which underpinned their early cotton wealth is never seen, but it is decried as a sin by their children. However, if the play spent time to decry the immortality of all the trades from which their – and our – wealth has been grown, there would be no story, and no play. This is a play about people doing remarkable things, just like anthropomorphised lions (Simba eats a lot of his subjects, we just don’t talk about it.)
The trilogy, a play in three acts, might be best understood as establishment, rise, and fall. The rise is nurtured beneath the astute eye of Emanuel’s son Philip (Lindsay), whom we follow from cradle to grave. High above his walk to work, performance artiste Solomon Paprinsky walks a tightrope daily, never falling in the many years of both their labours. As with so many little details cast in seemingly for narrative colour, this tightrope walker will return later, resurrected as an avatar of the ultimate fallibility of expertese. Old age, a Rabbi tells the geriatric founding Lehman’s ‘is another country’.
The fall only comes, the play is keen to advise, after the Lehman’s had weathered many a disaster, from the Cotton fires which all but destroyed their nascent business, to the Wall Street Crash. It is only with the termination of the Lehman line that the bank finally falls, shorn of the bedrock of brotherhood, faith, and hard work which underpinned its successes. In this sense, The Lehman Trilogy is a truly clasic tragedy, and a fable warning of the fate awaiting those who forget where their strength lies.
A penultimate hurrah with Robert ‘Bobby’ Lehman (Fraser), horse fancier, and ‘believer in people’ provides a see-sawing caper which swings from disaster to triumph, through the computer age, and into his 90’s. His eventual death offers one of the funnier moments in the show, not in the least disrespectful, and entirely fitting to the spritely dignity of character. After him, there’s no family, only business, red in 0’s and 1’s.
I could go on at length, extolling the virtues of the show, from the sharpening backdrop illustration as folk tale passes into recent history, or a sophisticated treatment of the Jewish faith, which offers some of the plays most touching moments. When that faith fades in the company’s inheritors, its a palpable loss, and the death of something precious. I could talk of the recurrent dream motifs which provide psychological depth and psychodelic imagery, or the immense skill in making a nickname of ‘potato’ such a funny, and memorable flourish. I could talk of Jon Clark’s deft lighting, woven from office spots, LED squares and a stripped down array of stage lights which glance from glazed panels and evoke the sun’s transit.
Having somehow gone on at length, I now stop, for just as with this tremendous play, the curtain must eventually fall. The Lehman Trilogy is quite simply as good as theatre gets. The finale, by the way – outstanding, the perfect ending, but more I will not say despite the evidence above.
The Lehman Trilogy is a production of The National Theatre, and Neal Street Productions
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