The head, the arm and the potato

The latest in an occasional series of theatre reviews...

The Lehman Trilogy : Gillian Lynne Theatre

I know this got great write-ups last time it was in London, which was back in 2018 - directed by Sam Mendes and starring Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles, all of whom were nominated for Olivier Awards.  So when I saw this was coming back, I booked early (even before the cast was announced, which I think was about 6 months ago now) and waited patiently for the time to come around (little knowing that I'd booked to see a 3.5 hour play the night after I was going to spend 3 hours in the theatre watching Derren Brown).

And it was a first time visit to this theatre as well - and very nice it is too (if in a slightly strange location).  And very wide, as I'd guessed beforehand because I was sitting in seat E65!  My seat gave me some concerns about visibility, but these completely disappeared when the curtain went up because everything was perfectly in sight.

The curtain rises to display a glass box obviously representing various office spaces within Lehman Brothers as various radio reports are played of their demise and someone tidies up some boxes - but then we're taken waaaay back to Hayum Lehmann (played by Nigel Lindsay) arriving in the USA in 1844 and immediately having his name changed to Henry Lehman by the border guard.  And we then get a very impressive ten minute monologue before Henry is joined by his brothers Emanuel (Michael Balogun) and Mayer (Hadley Fraser) to set up Lehman Brothers Cotton in Montgomery, Alabama (which wasn't exactly where I was expecting things to start).

And so, through the next three hours, the play takes us through the history of the firm and the people involved right up to the fateful day in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers ceased to exist.  For the most part, no additional cast members appear (more on this later) and no costume changes take place, but a wide variety of roles of both sexes and all ages are portrayed - mostly successfully (although some of the female parts come across as somewhat dubious).

The story is told as a linear timeline, although as we move forward it often harks back to previous times, which is mostly effective.  The dialogue is generally quite poetic, often using repeating themes to emphasise particular points - although there is a strange use of "spoken description" (I'm sure there's a correct literary phrase for it, but there's no danger of me knowing it) at times, whereby a character describes what he is thinking or what he is just about to say or do.  The other points to mention about the dialogue is that it is often very fast and there is, unsurprisingly, a LOT of it.  It was also often a lot funnier than I was expecting.

Which brings us on to the cast - I couldn't call one actor out above the others because they all do an excellent job and they must be knackered by the end of it.  As well as all the lines, there's quite a lot of positional memory involved - it's not a huge set, but they have a lot of movement within it, often whilst the set is also moving and they get involved in a reasonable amount of scenery shifting as well.

I mentioned earlier that the cast was mostly three people but, about 3 hours and 29 minutes in, 18 more people stream onto the stage and arrange themselves around a desk which is then rotated to the front of the stage for the final ten seconds.  None of them get to say or do anything more - which feels like a lot of people to arrange for what isn't exactly a critical scene (although it does look good).  Maybe I'm just being overly lazy on their behalf here, but it felt like an odd choice to me.

One other person who definitely deserves a mention is the piano player who provides a live score throughout the play - so I gave her a Google and can say that Yshani Perinpanayagam does an excellent understated job at what must be a very demanding task.

The reason the set was moving was that the big glass box rotates - it's quite an impressive piece of engineering.  The only other component of the set is the huge screen behind it, which uses some projection system that I can assure you I have absolutely no idea how it works, but it certainly works effectively.  At some of the more frenetic points in the play, the cube is rotating in one direction and the projection on the screen is rotating quickly in the opposite - a slightly off-putting effect to say the least.  But it's all used very effectively and looks tremendous.

Mostly I really enjoyed the play but, of course, I have some quibbles (a perfect 3.5 hours would be asking a lot!).  I'm not convinced it needed to be 3.5 hours - although Wikipedia tells me that the original Italian version (although the play was first staged in French) was 5 hours long, so I guess I got off lightly,  I'm also not convinced that the time is always spent in the most interesting areas - it was enlightening that the firm started off in cotton country in the Deep South, but personally I felt that spending a bit more time comparing the market crash in the 1920s and their "troubles" at the end might have been more interesting.  But I guess that's very much a personal preference.  I also got the impression that if I had slightly more knowledge of "the American dream" or Jewish customs, then there were probably several interesting parallels that I might have picked up on - but I don't, so I didn't.

One person who definitely didn't like the time spent on the firm's early days was sat in the seating section across from me - just as the first interval was approaching, he shouted "When does the play start?  I'm off to read Wikipedia" and stormed out.  Which was a first for me - and obviously also for quite a few others because there was a definite buzz in the interval. Lots of people raised it with the woman near me selling ice creams and it's fair to say she was not in the slightest bit interested in discussing it further.  I had a chat about it with the couple sitting next to me and I'm not saying they were posh, but did casually mention that they'd seeing proper booing when they went to Austria for the opera.

But whilst one person didn't enjoy it, the rest of us very much did - it felt like "proper" theatre which featured some tremendous acting and looked fantastic.  At 3.5 hours, it's not something to be undertaken light-heartedly though, so I appreciate that it's not going to be for everyone - but I'd certainly recommend it if you like your theatre to be challenging, but not TOO challenging.

Derren Brown - Showman - a most entertaining evening
Best Of Enemies - best of the year so far