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!