The Lehman Trilogy

Playwright: Stefano Massini Adaptation: Ben Power Director: Sam Mendes Lyttelton, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). Until 22 September Running time: 3hrs 20mins (including two intervals)

This 2013 drama, written by Stefano Massini, the Italian playwright, is “grown-up theatre at its best”, said Ann Treneman in The Times. It charts the “skyscraper rise and tumultuous fall” of the investment bank Lehman Brothers – from the arrival of Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman in the US from Germany in the mid-1840s, all the way through to the firm’s dramatic collapse in 2008. Spanning more than 160 years and three generations of the family, it is a story “as large as the American dream” itself. And as soon as British director Sam Mendes saw a production of it in Milan three years ago, he “knew he wanted to direct” the play himself.

Mendes’s “stroke of genius” is to present the play, skilfully adapted from the original by Ben Power, as a three-hander, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley each play not only three generations of Lehman men, but also everyone around them – women and children included. All three actors are “magnificent”, narrating the story and switching between characters “with the tiniest shifts of gesture”. Russell Beale is particularly impressive – his Lehman scion as convincing as his “demure 19th century Alabama girl”. The whole thing feels like “a really, really good history lecture”, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. One striking example is the way religion is seen to recede from the life of a Jewish family: they sit shiva for seven days when Henry dies in 1855, for just three minutes when Philip dies in 1947 and for no time at all after the death of Bobbie in 1969.

“The final stages of the firm’s collapse are rather hastily handled,” said Michael Billington in The Guardian. I’d have liked to learn a little more about the sub-prime mortgages that brought down this 160-year-old institution. But The Lehman Trilogy is an otherwise “impeccable production”. The set – a rotating glass cube backed by videos of the changing American landscape – is “beautiful”. The acting is top drawer. The story captures both the danger and the “dubious excitement” of “high-risk capitalism”. Don’t miss it.