Ben Power may have created a three-hour play about the history of Lehman Brothers, but even he doesn’t understand the collateralised debt obligations that bankrupted the bank in 2008 and triggered the global financial crisis.

That said, Power – whose English adaptation of The Lehman Trilogy, from an Italian script by Stefano Massini, opens at Sydney’s Theatre Royal on February 26 – is pretty sure that no Lehman partners understood the exotic mortgage securities that cost them their jobs and reputations either.