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Mastered by Mammon
SIMON PARSONS sees an epic account of how traditional business values are overwhelmed by corporate imperatives in The Lehman Trilogy
JAMES WALSH takes advantage of an evening of comedy snippets to pick out which clowns will make it in Edinburgh
MAYER WAKEFIELD is swept up by the tale of the south London venue where music forged alliances across race, class and identity
MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
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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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