The old grey wolves of Wall Street
THeRe is no denying that the staging is ingenious, as the Royal national theatre tells the story of that definitive American capitalist family, the lehmans. You will watch with admiration as just three fine actors — Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley — play out the historical saga. You will savour the cleverness of a revolving glass box in which they perform, scribbling on its walls with marker pens.
You will delight in various cameos they adopt, from bawling babies to a doddery rabbi, from coquettish potential wives to the cascade of lehman sons who over the decades turned the business from an Alabama cotton shop into the shiniest of Wall Street’s turbines, creating money out of abstracts.
What a sweep of narration! What possibilities were offered to 19thcentury arrivals by ‘the magical musical box called America’.
Yet for all this, and though the evening’s almost three- and- a- half hours ( with two intervals) pass agreeably enough, where is the soul? What, other than greed and selfassertion, motivated these lehmans? And what motivates their ilk in high finance? We are never quite told.
Sam Mendes’s production of this Stefano Massini play begins with a September 2008 Manhattan office cleaner silently going about his work amid the deserted desks of lehman Bros.
the place is filled with cardboard boxes and the cleaner’s transistor radio relates the news of lehmans’ bankruptcy. that shocking collapse came to symbolise the banking crisis, an all-too real fable of over-mighty pride leading to a terrible fall.
One might expect such a subject to earn a playwright’s wrath. this show chooses not to bare much indignation.
We are spared politicised morals, which in a way is a relief, and the production accordingly has a nicely detached air; yet our sympathies are never engaged. this is an intellectual evening which leaves the heart relatively unbrushed.
the first lehman we see is Mr Russell Beale’s hard- working Hayum, arriving at new York from Germany in 1844. A quayside official could not understand his name so he was put down as Henry.
Brothers emanuel and Mayer soon followed him to Alabama, where the loss of the cotton harvest to fire one year gave them the chance to progress from local traders to redevelopment financiers.
How simple it is all made to seem. When the American Civil War broke the cotton industry’s economics, the lehmans moved — abracadabra — to booming new York. Mr Miles’s emanuel is a thruster, Mr Godley’s Mayer the soft-spoken peace-maker.
Success is skittishly recounted: the nerdishness of emanuel’s son Philip, whose eye for strategy helped the company balloon before the stock market crash of the 1920s. there are skilful splashes of colour, such as the tightrope walker who performed in Wall Street every day ( an obvious but pleasing analogy).
MRRUSSell Beale sketches him with just a few tip- toey steps, plump fingers held either side of his portly frame. Mr Godley’s amazingly rubbery face enables him to switch characters in an instant.
All this time a pianist tinkles to one side of the stage, supplying appropriate accompaniment.
We see some of the suffering caused by bankers’ irresponsibility — volleys of jolting gunshot when Wall Street brokers killed themselves in the Crash, and small businesses banjaxed by the crisis — but they are placed second to the surging, jealous dominance of the lehmans.
the third part of the show, approaching the late 20th century, hurtles until your eyes hurt with the whizzing back- wall images. By the time the 2008 disaster happened, the lehmans themselves were history.
It would be grossly unfair to say the production is as insubstantial as the mirage of modern capitalism.
the spectacle is fascinating and the lehmans’ rise — from Henry with his one suitcase in 1844 to their billionaire status in the 1960s — is a great testament.
But to what? time and again the family members just demand ‘lots of zeroes’ in their profit accounts. this story is one of aspiration, without doubt. But it is not necessarily inspirational.