The house that Lehman built: a saga of family, greed and capitalism unhinged

The Lehman Trilogy, a morality tale about the Global Financial Crisis, opens this week in Sydney. MIRIAM COSIC gets a primer on the Jewish roots of a fallen giant.

He had been dreaming of America. Three brothers, travellers, immigrants. They came with nothing. Not even a word of English. And they built an entire universe. – The Lehman Trilogy

One might think that the world of finance – all those dry terms and endless rolls of numbers – would be the last thing to make exciting theatre. Let alone the verbiage of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, with its subprime mortgages, securitisation and credit default swaps.

Yet Italian playwright Stefano Massimo was inspired by the enormity of the GFC itself. He thought long and hard about it and narrowed down on the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank. The result was a five-hour piece of theatre that staggered its public. It took more than three years to write and has since been translated into a dozen languages.

“In the collapse of the bank, Massini, 42, wanted to find answers to how we got to where we are,” Francesca Angelini wrote in The Times of London in 2018. And the foundation story of Lehman, he discovered a devastating catalogue of human ambition and weakness: family, consumerism, the birth of a superpower, neurosis, immigration, religion.

Its pared-down Anglophone version, The Lehman Trilogy, adapted by English playwright Ben Power and directed by the renowned Sam Mendes to rave reviews and multiple awards during the five years it has been touring the world, opens in Sydney this Friday.

The actors who play the brothers are Aaron Krohn, Howard Overshown and Adrian Schiller, switching between dozens of side characters of all ages and with all kinds of accents as they go along.