Nightmare of the banking’s Lehman Brothers who ended up selling dreams

Generational saga of Bavaria’s Lehman Brothers who built an empire, but lost focus on their lives and family and paid the price. Let this be a cautionary tale.

The Lehman Trilogy - Theatre Royal Sydney

Henry Lehman landed in New York from Bavaria on September 11, 1844, trembling at the great possibilities awaiting him.

Exactly 164 years and four days later everything he desired was in ruins. In 2008 the investment bank that bore Henry’s surname went bankrupt.

This tumultuous saga of epic proportions begs for epic treatment and gets it in The Lehman Trilogy. Director Sam Mendes and writer Ben Power, adapting Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s original script, have made a huge, bold, prismatic piece of theatre that dazzles eye and ear as it charges exuberantly across place and time in three swiftly moving acts.

One of The Lehman Trilogy’s subjects is the erasure of a family and all it held dear, a tragedy entirely of its own making. The other is the translation of money into a malleable concept only lightly tethered to reality. Together they offer a cautionary tale about unfettered capitalism.

 

With immigrant tenacity Henry (Adrian Schiller) opens a fabric store in Montgomery, Alabama, and works all the hours God sends except, of course, on the Sabbath. Which means he can open on a Sunday when everyone else is closed. It’s a good opportunity.

Brothers Emanuel (Howard W. Overshown) and Mayer (Aaron Krohn) soon join Henry. The three have the gift of discovering the silver lining in just about anything.

Again and again they recalibrate. A fire that wipes out cotton plantations, the civil war, World War I, World War II – all are blips as Lehman Brothers finds a new way to prosper, until it doesn’t.

Audaciously the story is in the hands of only three actors, all marvellous, who play every character. They are the brothers, spouses, offspring, financial partners and more, economically summoned by adjustments of posture, expression and accent.

It’s an intriguing form of layering that keeps everything in the present (pianist Cat Beveridge, seated to one side as she plays Nick Powell’s score, adds another unifying layer).

Never changing from their sombre 19th-century frockcoats, the men are a little like ghosts, slipping inside their descendants.

When Schiller enacts Henry’s control-freak nephew Philip the transformation isn’t total. You also see hardworking Henry, and although Philip is monstrous his death comes with a shock. Upward mobility and ambition have ripped a Bavarian Jewish family from its stabilising roots.

This cornucopia of ideas is contained in a rotating glass box (designed by Es Devlin) filled with office furniture and piles of document boxes. Behind is a cyclorama on which Luke Halls’s painterly video designs evoke locations, moods and tones that alter as swiftly as clouds scudding across a windy sky.

The look, including Jon Clark’s superb lighting, takes the action instantly from rural Alabama to the glitter of Manhattan, anchoring a text that bristles with unstoppable energy. It’s wonderfully poetic, sometimes unruly, occasionally unsubtle and always unsettling.

Contradictions abound. The Lehmans’ initial fortune came from cotton but slavery is just a word to them. They are at first deeply religious and then hardly at all. They are supreme strategists who fail to comprehend the catastrophic effect of their brilliance.

Henry Lehman’s American dream started with a shop that sold things people needed in exchange for cash.

Before two centuries were out, all a money man had to do was sell a dream.

Mendes and Power don’t reconcile these things, just show them. The results is a rollercoaster ride that thrills and chastens from start to finish.

Tickets: $69-$269. Bookings: online. Duration: 3hr 20min, including two intervals. Ends March 24.