Is this even a play? - Not a fan of musicals

The Lehman Trilogy

This is not a play. It’s an audible dramatisation randomly interspersed with stage directions:

So-and-so undid the buttons of his double breasted jacket

So-and-so looked and him, smiled and said ‘no’

Call me old fashioned, but isn’t the idea behind acting that the audience sees the characters perform rather being told about what the characters are doing?

It is not a drama, it is three characters talking AT you, not really acting with one another.

Kudos – they had to learn so many lines. But I have no idea why someone felt the need to put this to stage – the staging does not add anything. The acting (if you can call it that) does not engage. Close your eyes – you won’t miss much. The upside will be you might fall asleep and the experience will end more swiftly. Because it is a very, very long experience and it feels even longer.

The story is somewhat interesting, more so the earlier parts dating back to the 18 hundreds. But it is stretched out far too much and becomes unbearably boring.

The show does get a couple of laughs, mainly when one of the all-male cast steps into the role of one of many highly exaggerated female character. I found it rather curious that all women were portrayed like annoying caricatures, not actual persons. And whilst there was a weak attempt to reference the misogyny of the presented eras, you would be excused for thinking that it was women, and women alone, who brought about the financial crisis – despite the all-male boardrooms of the day.

Oh, there are also laughs whenever “spud” or “potato” is mentioned (nickname of one of the three brothers). It felt at times like being part of a sitcom audience that laughs on que.

But I did not think that this was a story aimed at extracting a few cheap laughs. Should this not be a story making us think about how we got to 2008 and about how we prevent it from ever happening again? Maybe it should, but it does not . It goes over the decades, taking far longer than it needs to, to cover some aspects, whilst galloping over other themes that really require more exploration; it does not use any of the techniques available only to on-stage drama, instead resorting to a film-like background as a weak attempt to fill in the gaps.

I left the theatre thinking that I learnt very little and that I was not challenged to think. That the laughs were cheap and that despite the length, the story had not really been told. But more than anything, I left bewildered as to why this play had been receiving such amazing reviews. When it is not even a play… but an audible dramatisation interspersed with random stage directions.

You would never get that impression from all the rave reviews…