Reviews of Habibi Funk 031, Kayatibu, and The Good Ones
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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
SIMON DUFF relishes the cross contamination of Damien Hirst’s greatest hits by street artists from France and the US
In view of the grooming gangs inquiry, SIMON PARSONS feels the relevance of this powerful examination of trauma suffered at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre
JOHN GREEN doubts the motivations of a US war photographer who never questions why, or for whom, she is producing images of imperialist conflict
MARIA DUARTE reviews Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Hedda, The Mastermind, and Regretting You
TONY CONWAY welcomes a thrilling and concise history of Hope not Hate, that is also a manual full of tactical advice
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes an inspiring account of living with deafness that has important lessons for the treatment of deaf people in today’s UK
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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