Three brothers – Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehmann – are at the centre of Stefano Massini’s play. One after the other, they make their way from Germany to America in the 1840s, and there they start doing business. In the 1850s they establish the Lehman Brothers bank.

This epic play follows the career of the Lehman brothers, their family life, which honours traditions and is thus characteristic of Jewish culture, and how the bank fared through a century and a half, on the background of the building up and flourishing of American capitalist economy.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. developed into a financial enterprise with a global scope, the fourth largest bank in America. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008. That is considered to be one of the primary triggers of the worldwide economic crisis that followed.

The author reworked the three-act Lehman Trilogy (2012) that had originally been written as a radio play into a stage play, which reached the stage for the first time in 2015 in the form of a French translation. Thereafter it was staged in Milan, Italy. It premiered in the West End in 2018, and this year the play also made it to Broadway.