Review: THE LEHMAN TRILOGY, Gillian Lynne Theatre - October 2024
Photo credit: Mark Douet
New York in the 1840s and three Jewish brothers arrive from Germany one by one; they settle in Montgomery, Alabama and open a general store. The company prospers, first by selling cotton, but by 1867, they have become a bank, founding the financial empire that would survive wars and successive stock exchange crashes before eventually becoming bankrupt after the mortgage crisis in 2008. It is a remarkable chronicle, and made more all the more intriguing by the means by which the story is told on stage.
Originally an even longer play by Stefano Massini, Ben Power’s adaptation of The Lehman Trilogy tells the story in three acts, the running time of more than three hours seeming to flash by as the inevitable end approaches. That inevitability is underscored by one of the many key decisions taken by the production team led by original Director Sam Mendes, in that we see the brothers in their nineteenth century clothes arriving at the offices which are about to be cleared following the bankruptcy which ends the play, and the story is told using the detritus which accompanied its ending.
The actors playing the three brothers, John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W. Overshown, portray all of the other characters too: their partners, descendants and business associates. They do so with great skill, remarkable economy and through deft gestures or changes of stance, whether that might be Heffernan as the long-lived Philip Lehman, Krohn as Bobbie Lehman or Overshown, transforming in a second into an infant. They change gender by a turn and the lifting of a collar, and do it all on a set festooned with the famous boxes that employees were seen carrying out of the building at the end.
Those boxes also serve as steps, seats, platforms and metaphors, and all within designer Es Devlin’s remarkable rotating glass box of a set, immeasurably enhanced by monochrome images on the vast cyclorama behind. Pianist Cat Beveridge plays everything from Yiddish lullaby to playful interludes and, in the later parts of the story, a more abstract and sombre score.
At times through narration and at others by direct portrayal, the dialogue tells the story and comments on it. The script has an inbuilt musicality too, using rhythm and repetition to create resonance and recall in the audience: in some ways, for example, the often mentioned door with the handle that sticks is also a metaphor for wider problems in the South. At times, the whole audience are stilled to an extent not often seen in the theatre, listening intently and totally absorbed.
The Lehman Trilogy is an unmissable theatrical event, bringing together three great performances in an inventive and intriguing production of a fascinating and still relevant story.
***** Five stars
Reviewed by: Chris Abbott
