Massini’s Lehman Trilogy: An Epic Theatrical Poem in Cinematic Cut

The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini (Firenze, 1975) presents a new form of writing which combines the metrical structure of a highly poetic and rhythmic prose as in a ballad, with theatrical/cinematic direct speech and ordinary prose. The Lehman Trilogy was written as a literary work in 2014, but its potential as a play on a contemporary theme, the economic crash of 2008, was soon realised. It was staged in France by the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, as Chapitre de la chute with seven actors winning the critics award and touring until 2016. It was performed in Dresden and Cologne in Germany with four actors and in Spain with 12 actors.  In 2015 the director Luca Ronconi staged it as a five hours performance for the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. The play is currently at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, directed by Sam Mendes until 20 October, 2018.

Massini declared that his theatre is not classical, nor can it be classified as ‘teatro di narrazione’ [narrative theatre] which relies, he states, on the ‘complicity’ of the audience. His theatre instead takes the audience through the momentous events of the Lehman family in their rise to power outlining at the same time the stepping stones of capitalism. ‘Mine is a literary structure with a strong rhythmic beat. It is written in a prose metre which alternates overtly rhythmic passages with direct speech or prose.’ This unusual combination was highlighted by Luca Ronconi as an asset. For Ronconi, its different components were to be kept apart to maintain their distinctiveness, their own originality. The ballad and the action have certainly to be cherished for the intrinsic qualities of each, yet in The Lehman Trilogy the poetic narrative of the ballad flows without pauses, and spontaneously in acted dialogues. Their connection, their rolling into one another, gives the Trilogy  a cinematic feel, a fast editing pace which keeps the events flowing and the attention of the audience active.

Narrative theatre derived from Dario Fo’s theatre, especially the monologues of Mistero buffo (1969), came to the fore in the last decade of the 20th century in Italy with powerful practitioners like Marco Paolini (b. 1956), Marco Baliani (b.1950) among others and a second generation of narrators/performers with for example Ascanio Celestini (b. 1972). Narrative theatre is mainly in literary prose, but its style is evolving. From one actor as narrator and performer, preferably seated, without scenography, with  minimum lighting, it has acquired an onomatopoeic soundtrack as in Baliani’s Kohlaas (1989) where the sound of horse hooves is produced by his stamping feet and where a backdrop of horses provides elementary yet powerful scenography. The narration can give way to dialogues between different characters, but as the performer is one, their speeches always follow one another as single monologues.

As in Fo, the narrators/performers establish with the audience a common ground of understanding, given by known historical events, for example Paolini’s Il racconto del Vajont (1994) recounts the Vajont tragedy of 1963. They tend to personalise their narration with their own memories, as Baliani in Corpo di stato (1998) on the political assassination of Moro and Celestini in Scemo di guerra (2005). However, narrative inspiration and material are also drawn from literature and indirect memories.

Massini’s Trilogy goes a step further. He takes the ballad, resurrecting a medieval and renaissance genre and modernises it with crisp, incisive, acted dialogues. Indeed, his ballad, which is his narrative medium, is pure poetry. The words possess the appropriateness, the density and the synthesis that characterise personae and facts, outlining their individual, social and historical background in a single trait. His ballad is epic as it tells of events. If one thought that epic episodes could only be told in the theatre in prose dialogues supported by songs as in Brecht’s works, Massini proves that the ballad, accompanied by action, is a suitable vehicle for epic content. He connects with the audience, who shares with him the memory of the 2008 financial crash, by giving facts about the rise of the Lehman dynasty, and builds on their knowledge of economics, but he never imposes an ethical or social reading and interpretation. For Massini ‘history will tell’. Moreover, he updates the epic ballad genre by adding a number of carefully defined characters, who animate his acted dialogues and stand out from the narrative. Ballad and action are pulled together by the rhythm of the ballad and a synthetic, dry poetry which characterises the dialogues as well, and finds resonance in the neorealist black and white cinematic cut of the dialogues. So, Massini’s Trilogy presents a new form of writing which mingles genres and media: a poetic ballad, interspersed with theatrical acts, cut in cinematic style, conveying an epic content.

Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Skyfall, Spectre) brings to the fore the theatrical and visual elements of Lehman Trilogy in his staging at the National Theatre. Ben Power, the adapter, and Mendes converted the suitable parts of the ballad into acted dialogues in such tight cohesion that narrative and dialogues are almost indistinguishable.Their flow from narration to immediate action is relentless. Mendes maintains the rhythm of the original ballad using theatrical means, but at the same time he enhances it using images and motion. The set, an enormous transparent cube, rotates against the concave backdrop of the stage. On it, mainly black and white images are screened moving horizontally when portraying the different locations of the story and vertically when depicting the frantic fall of the shares of the New York Exchange. So that Mendes cinematic interpretation translates in images and in movement Massini’s work and expands the potentiality of the Trilogy’s theatrical and cinematic components.

Feature image: credit Mark Douet