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Mastered by Mammon
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The Lehman Trilogy
National Theatre, London
IN ATTEMPTING to capture the history of capitalism through the rise and demise of a company that provided the finance behind much that has shaped the US — from cotton, oil and transport to weapons, films and mass consumption — this epic play is much more than a German-Jewish immigrant saga.
The Lehman Trilogy, structured and styled like some biblical epic with all the associated rhetoric, symbolism and seismic events, soon shifts from the 2008 glass-and-steel Manhattan offices of Lehman Brothers, facing the largest ever US bankruptcy, back to Henry Lehman’s arrival in 1844 New York and on to his small “fabric and suit” business in Montgomery, Alabama.
With the arrival of his brothers Emanuel and Mayer and their ability to adapt to economic opportunities, the business soon moves into cotton trading and then banking in response to the need to rebuild the South after the civil war.
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