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.

The slow corrosion of traditional Jewish values and culture in a business originally built on trust, relationships and material investments is epitomised when the next Lehman generation sees the morally conscientious Herbert forced out by the ruthlessly calculating Philip as the corporation becomes an investment company.

The three-man cast memorably bring Ben Power’s adaptation of Stefano Massini’s 2013 Italian play to life under Sam Mendes's controlled direction as they construct a world of engaging characters in front of Es Devlin’s transparent, rotating set with cycloramic projections of New York, civil war conflagration and spinning stock-market figures.

Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley are wonderfully cast as the original three brothers, deeply engrained in their roots culture and work ethic. But they are equally skilled in effortlessly switching between Southern plantation owners, traditional elderly rabbis and the next generations of Lehmans bred and educated for business and a spectrum of potential wives.

As the warmth and respect for others inherent in the Jewish roots are lost and God is replaced by Mammon, the trilogy loses its initial human engagement. The drama of the Wall Street Crash, echoing some Tower of Babel or Sodom and Gomorrah, reawakens the connection with the characters, but the last part of the trilogy, as the family’s involvement with the corporation disappears, becomes more a factual narrative than an epic poem.

The play's subject has acute contemporary relevance and only the soulless, corporate nature of that collapse limits the production’s impact in pointing that up.

Runs until October 20, box office: nationaltheatre.org.uk