THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at the Gillian Lynne Theatre

★★★★★

“a towering study of human drives, frailties, venality and, yes, exuberance”

On September 15, 2008, something was stirring. I went to the window of my Canary Wharf office and peered down to see an ant trail of sacked Lehman Bros workers trooping from 25 Bank Street, carrying storage boxes full of BlackBerries, Rolodexes, picture frames and trophies.

Wall Street’s fourth largest investment bank had collapsed. The first domino had fallen. The credit crunch had arrived.

A few months later I looked out of another Docklands window to see, rather incongruously, President Barack Obama step out to join an emergency meeting of the G20 at Excel London. There, world leaders would devise a punishing solution that would bring about austerity, Brexit, and the rise of the populist right.

How did we get here? How did the bankers topple the world and walk away scot free?

Who are these people? What is their nature?

To answer that question, director Sam Mendes takes the long view and, in doing so, compiles a towering study of human drives, frailties, venality and, yes, exuberance. He also manages to capture, almost by accident, the story of money and the story of America. His touch is light and impeccable, and the results are truly astonishing.

In The Lehman Trilogy, Es Devlin’s stage design, a rotating cube, is monochromatic and stark, all glass and steel, with a screen backdrop that provides the sweeping epic with a suitable sense of cinematic grandeur.

Those bankers’ boxes too, now icons of the crisis, litter the stage, linking past and present. Boxes everywhere, stacked and restacked like a child’s toy blocks on the neatly revolving stage. Everything is kinetic, structured and measured with geometric precision.

Three actors – John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W Overshown – initially play the Lehman brothers but eventually everyone else in this sprawling tale. They take us on a journey which starts with three penniless Jewish immigrants selling cloth in a small shop in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844, and ends in the high-rolling and blinkered C-suites of New York on that fateful September day.

From Bavaria to the boardroom, we come to understand how ambition slowly calcifies into greed which hardens further into self-serving indifference. But, remarkably, in this retelling, there is no judgement, no polemic, just acute observations of human foibles.

The three actors play the brothers and their families deftly and with relish. Heffernan is a phenomenon, a marvel, by turns twinkle-eyed and twitchy. Overshown is immense. Krohn’s succession of coquettish female suitors is a delight. For all its serious purpose, the play is a hoot.

The script, by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power has a journalistic hunger for story-telling, for the engaging hook, for gossip – and generations of Lehmans offer up more than their fair share of material, surviving fire, war, technology and the Great Depression and always, always making money.

What an immense achievement.

When the story of capitalism comes to be told as history, The Lehman Trilogy may well be a defining text, capturing all the dazzling allure and catastrophic folly of that very human endeavour.

The value of stocks may rise and fall – but this production? Pure gold. Buy! Buy! Buy!

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at the Gillian Lynne Theatre

Reviewed on 9th October 2024

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Mark Douet

Previously reviewed at this venue:

STANDING AT THE SKY’S EDGE | ★★★★★ | February 2024

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY | ★★★★★ | February 2023

THE LION, THE WITCH & THE WARDROBE | ★★★★★ | July 2022

CINDERELLA | ★★★★★ | August 2021

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

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EURYDICE at Jermyn Street Theatre

★★

“Occasionally it feels as though the actors, lost in their own underworld, are making it up as they go along”

“Orpheus was beginning to get very tired of sitting by his girlfriend on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice he had peeped into the book she was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Orpheus, ‘without pictures or conversation?’

Apart from the name changes, the opening line of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ would slot neatly into the stage directions of Sarah Ruhl’s reimagining of “Eurydice”. There is an almost childlike absurdism to the language. A kind of existential nonsense.

Eurydice and Orpheus are at the seaside: a couple of awkward teenagers, looking at life in different ways, but not really looking at each other. She is into her books; he just cares for his music. A bit of an odd couple. They don’t come across as being madly in love with each other at all, so when Orpheus pops the question, it feels like another game.

Meanwhile, Eurydice’s dead father is preparing his wedding speech. He obviously can’t attend the wedding, so he drops the letter down to earth, only for it to be picked up by the bowler-hatted, interesting yet sinister Lord of the Underworld. He picks up the letter, then promptly picks up Eurydice as she escapes her wedding party for a breath of fresh air. Eurydice follows him to his high-rise apartment where things get a bit uncomfortable. Tragedy strikes, and while Eurydice trips on the stairs to her death, the show itself plunges further into a rabbit hole of surrealism.

Ruhl’s intention is to take the focus away from Orpheus and to tell the story through Eurydice’s perspective. She certainly gives her more stage time, but we remain somewhat confused as to whom we should be paying attention to. Eve Ponsonby reliably portrays Eurydice as a woman stuck between two different worlds, but the audience are lodged between differing viewpoints. She has crossed the River Lethe in the Underworld thereby forgetting her earthly existence, even her husband’s name. Her journey of love, loss and grief (although without the memory – what is there to grieve?) is one that she must take on her own, yet we cannot escape the prominence of the men. Especially her father, played with conviction by Dickon Tyrrell. Keaton Guimarães-Tolley’s Orpheus is less secure and lacking passion. Joe Wiltshire Smith, as the Lord of the Underworld, has the most fun. Described as a nasty, interesting man, he is by far the most interesting character onstage. Not so much nasty as sinisterly bonkers. A warped Jimmy Clitheroe through the looking glass.

The narrative is underscored with interjections from the ‘stones’, played with a Pythonesque inanity by Katy Brittain, Tom Morley and Leyon Stolz-Hunter. Bizarrely dressed like creepy nuns, they are not so much a chorus but an echoing backing vocal. The timing of their delivery is often out of kilter, lending further banality to their presence – which we had already begun to question.

Director Stella Powell-Jones bravely takes on all the idiosyncrasies of the script but, even at under an hour and a half, the story still drags – weighed down further by its inconsistencies. Occasionally it feels as though the actors, lost in their own underworld, are making it up as they go along. We do wonder what world Ruhl is creating, and while we admire the ideas that shape her interpretation of “Eurydice”, we are not truly inspired to dig deeper. Curiouser and curiouser we aren’t.

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at the Gillian Lynne Theatre

★★★★★

“a towering study of human drives, frailties, venality and, yes, exuberance”

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at the Gillian Lynne Theatre

Reviewed on 9th October 2024

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Mark Douet

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

EURYDICE at Jermyn Street Theatre

★★

“Occasionally it feels as though the actors, lost in their own underworld, are making it up as they go along”

EURYDICE at Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed on 8th October 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Alex Brenner

Previously reviewed at this venue:

EURYDICE

EURYDICE

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