LEHMANS REVISITED
The first time I saw Sam Mendes’ production at the NT, I exclaimed that the evening had no right to be so much fun: three hours, three chaps in black frock coats, no song and dance stuff, a mainly monochrome cyclorama of Alabama fields and New York skylines. And it’s all about money, the progress of a financial dynasty from 1844 to the final collapse – after the last Lehman died – of the legendary Lehman Brothers. Immigrant struggles, a few decorous marriages, lads dragooned into the family business, and disaster.
But it is in fact wonderful. I say it again, after the third time viewing, second in this big theatre. Here are my first two reviews – to explain what happens:
The first one in the period saw Trump visiting the UK, the second was post-Trussonomics. Both had echoes then. Now the age of Reeves and the invisible huge Black Hole made it a great one to see again, and reflect on the way humanity treats money and the way money treats people.
But this time – with a terrific new AngloAmerican cast – it is just as fine. Aaron Krohn and Howard. W Overshown were tremendous, fast and physically witty (especially Krohn) and flexible; on the night I was there Henry, the first brother to land at Ellis Island and begin the narration, should have been John Heffernan. He was unwell, though, and we got the particular, very theatrical, pleasure of seeing his understudy – Leighton Pugh – doing a note-perfect, witty, confident job of that huge role. It is always good to know that a production is careful enough to have that quality of understudies.
But as I have linked to my old reviews, got once as a veteran audience member I thought I would reflect on extra ways it is so brilliant. There is the way the men need to be shape-shifters, clowns, yet always themselves – always Henry, Meyer and Emanuel, so that even when oddities in the family crop up, the old resemblance haunts you. They are sometimes their own sons, or wives, or customers; sometimes their own ghosts requires flexibility and wit in all three performers (Russell Beale was the original Henry).
There is the use of metaphor: sometimes obvious, as in the sense of confident gambling in the tale of wire-walker Samuel Paprinsky, who crossed Wall Street for years before falling, but sometimes gentler: each of the three, when they seize a marker pen to draw shop names on the glass wall, does it subtly differently.
But above all, more of a warning every year, there is the play’s sense of wild, stormy, exuberantly adventurous drift away from the solid and into the magical-realism of 21c finance. You begin with overall cloth in bales, switch to lending seed for a return in cotton; link with those who make the cotton into cloth… and as you encounter the bigger, biggest big-time of the New York world move gradually into expansion into other materials, from coffee to railroads, until you see that you need none of these real and solid things, only numbers on a screen…
It’s a wonderful production, humane and sorrowful and adventurous and wild, all done in frock-coats. Defy you not to love it.
Thelehmantrilogy.com. To 5 jan
Still 5, obviously.
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