Con’s Score: 4.5 Sheckles
The Lehman Brothers name will always be synonymous with the collapse of the bank which set off the Global Financial Crisis of 2009. The history of three Jewish brothers from Bavaria who started it hardly sounds like the stuff of great theatre, but it’s the subject of this National Theatre Live production directed by Sam Mendes.
It’s a different approach to storytelling, in that it’s straight out to the audience story telling. Stefano Massini’s script could have featured many actors, but all this is carried by just three actors: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles. Three actors, playing off each other, while reciting what could have been a book directly to the audience. (I estimate the script was at least 25,000 words – a short-to-medium novel’s length.) They each play leading characters and morph into others, including wives and girlfriends, old men and children, easily and with good humour. It is brilliant acting and each one gets their chance to shine.
Their story starts with the first act, called “Brothers”, in 1844, when Henry Lehman disembarks in New York and the concept of America becomes real. “He took a deep breath, picked up his suitcase and walking quickly, despite not knowing where to go, like so many others he stepped into the magical music box called America.” You know you’re in for a treat with a script this good.
He tells us the story of how he set up a fabric store in Alabama, before his brother Emmanuel joins him, followed by Mayer. They decide to diversify into selling seeds and equipment. A fire in the cotton fields devastated the plantation lake and owners, who they helped by providing equipment for free and taking a third of their cotton which they needed to find sellers for. The middleman came into existence, and they transformed into cotton traders.
The second act focuses on the “Fathers and Sons”. This act tells how Emmanuel’s son, Phillip, took the business from trading in cotton, coffee and other commodities and into financing railroads, and building the Panama Canal. They were now trading in money. Mayer’s son Herbert, became a politician who rivalled Roosevelt. The third act follows Phillips son, Robert, whose love for art and horses helped him foresee the growth of computers and the profitability in trading in futures.
What works best is the snappy delivery and how well these three work together. Their pace is heady and it’s very crisp. The script is lush with descriptions and imagery. It veers into side stories about how they wooed wives, the worlds they moved in, Esposito Solomon the Wall Street tightrope walker, the suicides following the 1929 share market crash to how they mourned each other’s deaths. It uses repetition well to emphasise small but telling points. There is rhythm in good writing, and these three find it, and keep it going like a tight jazz set.
Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall, Road to Perdition) has worked them into a tight unit. The whole look and feel is sparse compared to the largess of their success. Ez Devlin’s set is a see through office which revolves. It’s a modern office, with those ubiquitous boxes, but it serves each era well. The backdrop is a screen of ever changing designs projected onto it. It also plays to the moods and the times.
The soundtrack is a lone piano that helps to accentuate the action. There’s even a short film about the sound design and pianist between the final two acts.
At 210 minutes, including intervals, this is a challenging production time-wise, but it is covering 174 years of American history. It’s never boring. Mendes and the actors set a pace and energy that only flails at the very end when the Lehman family is no longer involved – or was that me? The intervals are welcome as a break from the pace, but I was always looking forward to the next act.
This is not just a story of three Jewish brothers, or the Lehman family, but it’s also a morality tale of capitalism, corporate America, and how it lost its soul. Don’t be put off by the length. This is breath taking theatre.
Con Nats – On The Screen
Photo Credit: Mark Douet
