STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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Mastered by Mammon
SIMON PARSONS sees an epic account of how traditional business values are overwhelmed by corporate imperatives in The Lehman Trilogy
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
The Lehman Trilogy
National Theatre, London
IN ATTEMPTING to capture the history of capitalism through the rise and demise of a company that provided the finance behind much that has shaped the US — from cotton, oil and transport to weapons, films and mass consumption — this epic play is much more than a German-Jewish immigrant saga.
The Lehman Trilogy, structured and styled like some biblical epic with all the associated rhetoric, symbolism and seismic events, soon shifts from the 2008 glass-and-steel Manhattan offices of Lehman Brothers, facing the largest ever US bankruptcy, back to Henry Lehman’s arrival in 1844 New York and on to his small “fabric and suit” business in Montgomery, Alabama.
With the arrival of his brothers Emanuel and Mayer and their ability to adapt to economic opportunities, the business soon moves into cotton trading and then banking in response to the need to rebuild the South after the civil war.
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