National Theatre Live: The Lehman Trilogy

Three actors, three hours, a hundred and sixty years. Ben Power adapted Stefano Massini's epic text for the English stage from Mirella Cheeseman's translation, and Sam Mendes directed. Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley play not only the three Lehman brothers but their sons, grandsons, wives and clients. The cast never expands and the actors barely change costume; identity shifts through voice and posture alone. Es Devlin's design seals the whole play inside a single glass office box. The box turns on a revolve, so the vertigo of the rise and the vertigo of the collapse arrive through the same motion. There is almost no furniture: a dozen shoebox-sized cartons stand in for everything. The production opened at the Lyttelton on 12 July 2018 and closed on 20 October. The story runs from an immigrant fabric shop in Alabama to the 2008 collapse. Who it is for: viewers who want the origins of the 2008 crisis at human scale and do not mind a filmed stage production. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a film. This is a theatre recording, and it tells the story of the firm's founders rather than the crash's victims.