The Lehman Trilogy review: Financial saga is less than the sum of its parts

Did Stefano Massini, the Italian playwright who wrote The Lehman Trilogy, and Ben Power, who adapted it into English, get paid by the word? It’s crammed with monologues and soliloquies, exposition, lists of facts and explanations of financial terminology, with the English version truncated from five hours to three verbose, rambling and loquacious hours’ worth of dialogue where even the stage directions (“So and so bites his lip”, “Such and such pours himself a glass of water”) are read out by the actors as they perform the actions they’re describing.

Directed by Sam Mendes, the play – which ran at the National Theatre in 2018 and in the West End the following year – has been hailed as a work of genius. Finally catching up with it in its current revival at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, I disappointedly beg to differ.

Its three acts, broken up by two intervals, are repetitious and a slog to get through. The tone is the same throughout and it’s a pretty awkward one, seemingly affectionate towards a bunch of characters whose pursuit of wealth and power triggered a devastating financial crisis when their company went bankrupt.

Were they morally bankrupt too? The play sideswipes judgement along with a compelling point of view, so the story of the Lehman Brothers – Jewish immigrants who relocated from Bavaria to New York in the mid-1800s, began trading in cotton and eventually founded one of the world’s biggest investment banks – plays like a Wikipedia summary.

Events are checked off listicle-style and there are few fleshed-out narrative scenes, just a headlong rush through the decades which actually feels sluggish because – without any in-depth exploration of what made these characters tick or motivated their greed – there’s no dramatic momentum.

There is, however, a misguided humorous undercurrent that often presents the Lehman family as loveable rogues and, as was noted by critics in America when the show played Broadway, there’s no mention of the fact that they kept slaves for more than 20 years.

The staging is stunning; a revolving glass box in front of a curved screen onto which are projected plantations and Manhattan skylines. And the trio of Michael Balogun, Hadley Fraser and Nigel Lindsay work incredibly hard as they play the original Lehman brothers, their sons and heirs. Unfortunately, they’re also required to play subsidiary female characters, which makes for jarring moments of high camp.

I’m in a minority here, I know, but for me The Lehman Trilogy is a play that uses many, many words to say very little. Despite a prestige director, a top-notch cast and impressive visuals, it amounts to much less than the sum of its parts.

Rating: 2/5

The Lehman Trilogy is at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, London, until 20 May. Get tickets here