This New Play Turns the Financial Crisis Into High Art
Albert Camus once said that “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” and there’s no better example than the 2008 financial crisis of a truth so big that facts may never capture its entirety.
Entire forests have been decimated by the journalistic and academic work explaining the crisis, which reportedly cost Americans more than $12 trillion. But those events have also inspired works of fiction, from movies such as The Big Short and Margin Call to novels like Behold the Dreamers and plays like The Power of Yes and, now, The Lehman Trilogy, a three-part epic directed by Sam Mendes that will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory this month.
Maybe it’s not surprising that artists would find inspiration in something so seismic. The financial crisis didn’t just upend the global economy, it reshaped the assumptions that govern modern societies in profound ways I still see playing out a decade later.
Ben Power, the deputy artistic director of Britain’s National Theatre, who adapted The Lehman Trilogy from its Italian original (written by Stefano Massini), feels similarly. “I’ve always been fascinated by big stories,” he says. “Stories that tell us about systems that shape our lives, whether we are aware of them or not.”
Romantic is a word that Power often uses to describe the work, and at first it seems an odd way to label a story about the long rise and brutally swift fall of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank whose bankruptcy marked the crescendo of the financial crisis. But the play is about much more than a bankruptcy.
In 1844 the first of three brothers from Germany, Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer Lehman, landed in America. The play tells the tale of how, over the ensuing decades, the brothers built a giant of American finance. In so doing, it also tells a story about the creation and corruption of modern capitalism. “It explores the ways in which capitalism divorced itself from its founding principles,” Power says, adding that the play is an “epic poem,” not a mere business story.
Perhaps that’s what allows The Lehman Trilogy to offer a new understanding of its topic. Fiction can transform complex financial shenanigans into human stories in ways reporting never could. Think of Jeremy Irons in Margin Call, as the CEO of an investment bank with a balance sheet full of toxic securities who decides to unload them on unsuspecting customers.
Irons conveys fear, cynicism, and a monomaniacal desire for self-preservation, and his scenes explain more about the dark side of Wall Street than any nonfiction written about Goldman Sachs.“Storytelling can be more effective when it’s not a lecture but a passionate and, yes, romantic rendition,” Power says.
If fiction can give us a deeper understanding of the past, maybe it can also provide insight about the future. “Ten years on, the impact of the financial crisis is still being felt,” Power says. “There’s a direct link from the financial crisis to austerity, Brexit, and the rise of populism you see all over the world. It’s crucial that we look at it now. What were the systems, why did they behave the way they did, and can it happen again?”
Those, of course, are the very questions being asked by people who live and breathe financial markets. If playwrights and moviemakers can provide answers, then thank goodness, because the world knows all too well that reality, unlike fiction, can bite.
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