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When Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley greet one
another in the echoing spaces of an empty restaurant in London’s
National Theatre, it’s all of a sudden like being at a family reunion.
The actors haven’t seen one another much since they finished per-
forming The Lehman Trilogy in the West End some months previ-
ously; there’s a lot of catching up to do.
Russell Beale has moved to a new house in Wiltshire, in the south-
west of England; Miles is about to go to Philadelphia to film Mare
of Easttown, an HBO series starring Kate Winslet that is scheduled
for later this year; Godley is back from Naples, where he has been
playing a Russian Orthodox archbishop with a lot of facial hair for
a Hulu show called The Great, based on the life of Catherine the
Great. There is so much news to exchange that it’s hard to get a word
in edgewise. It’s early in the day, and there are no other diners in the
brown-paneled upstairs restaurant,
but the enthusiastic sound of their
conversation makes it feel full.
The easy rapport between the
three men is appropriate. In Italian
playwright Stefano Massini’s The
Lehman Trilogy (adapted by Ben
Power), which opens at Broadway’s
Nederlander Theater this month
under the direction of Sam Mendes,
the trio are the only speaking char-
acters for the entire duration of the
show. Over three acts and three and
a half hours, they play the founding members of the financial giant
Lehman Brothers—Henry (Russell Beale, 59), Emanuel (Miles,
53), and Mayer (Godley, 55)—as well as 70-odd additional charac-
ters, tracing an arc from the beginning of the business in 1844 to its
world-altering collapse in 2008. Though today they are all dressed in
variants of black, the actors present a study in contrasts: Miles darkly
debonair, with his silver hair and quiet containment; Russell Beale
exuberant and voluble, talking quickly; Godley gently and wittily
holding the ring between them—as he does in the play, where the
youngest brother, Mayer (“the potato”), is the force between Henry
(“the head”) and Emanuel (“the arm”).
The Lehman Trilogy begins when Henry arrives in New York from
Bavaria and steps into, as the play puts it, “the magical music box
called America.” Three years later, in 1847, he’s joined by Emanuel
and Mayer, and together they establish a fabric shop in Montgomery,
Alabama, which grows—thanks to their ingenuity—into a brokerage
for raw cotton. The play traces their company’s expansion; they
move to New York, found a bank, and in the next generation, under
Emanuel’s son Philip Lehman, conquer Wall Street by investing in
iron, fabric, coal, coffee, trains, and oil. The company skids through
the crash of 1929 and then grows during the Second World War by
investing in arms. As it swings through history, the play details how a
business built on trading tangible commodities becomes one in which
the movement of stock—regardless of its worth—is the end in itself.
“Stocks and shares dance because the market was made to dance,” as
Emanuel’s grandson Bobby Lehman (played by Godley) puts it. By
1983, after a power struggle, the traders have taken over, the legacy
of the bankers has been lost, and Lehman Brothers is a family firm
in name only. The firm’s move into the subprime-mortgage market in
the late 1990s seals its fate; its collapse became the largest bankruptcy
filing in U.S. history. All of this is told through an astonishing the-
atrical conjuring act in which Russell Beale, Miles, and Godley both
narrate what is happening and enact it. The transformations between
different eras and personalities happen without the help of costume
changes or props. The three actors, in dark, formal frock coats, give
towering, subtle performances as they lift a collar or incline their
heads to become women, children, plantation owners, city tycoons.
But before The Lehman Trilogy was a pared-down, three-actor
affair, it was a 200-page play by Massini, first performed in France
in 2013. Mendes heard about it when he read the obituary of director
Luca Ronconi, who had helmed the Italian premiere at Piccolo Teatro
in Milan in 2015. “Like everyone at the time of the Lehman Broth-
ers crash, I was completely obsessed with the personnel involved,”
Mendes says. “I’d thought originally I might make a film about it, but
that never got past the ideas stage.” He asked for the Italian text to
be sent to him at his home in London and read it in a literal English
translation. “To my surprise, the play began in the1840s, and it had
no obvious dramatic form. It was written like an epic poem, with no
clue as to who said each line.” The
Italian version ran to five hours,
over two nights; when Mendes
contacted Massini, however, the
Italian playwright told him he was
free to adapt it however he wanted.
Mendes turned to Power, then dep-
uty artistic director of the National
Theatre, who began to work on a
new English version. (Power had
previously adapted D. H. Law-
rence’s Husbands & Sons and Eurip-
ides’ Medea for the National.)
Like Mendes, Massini had been captivated by the story of the Leh-
man bankruptcy and, more broadly, the “machinery of capitalism,”
as Power puts it. Power went to see Massini at his home outside Flor-
ence when he was halfway through his first draft. “I had a huge list
of questions and things I didn’t understand,” Power remembers. “He
was generous and entertaining, full of stories and extra material....
It was more like adapting a nondramatic text than translating a play.”
In the middle of 2016, Mendes and Power recruited 15 actors to
participate in a workshop at the National Theatre Studio. Russell
Beale, who had worked with Mendes on 10 plays, was one of them.
The workshop included some “bad mime,” lots of props, and some
instantly discardable ideas, says Russell Beale with a laugh. “We were
trying to find a vocabulary to tell the story,” the actor says. “And my
character, Henry, died after page 15.”
“That’s a very early bath,” Godley throws in, laughing too.
“You’d be home by 9 p.m.,” adds Miles.
“There’s a great line in Christopher
Marlowe about ‘infinite riches in
a little room,’ ” says Mendes, “and
I use the same line about theater.
It has an endless capacity to convey a huge
amount with very little”
