playwright — Arts — Then Do Better

“The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrive in America and found an investment firm/brokerage through to the collapse of the company in 2008.”

As a playwright and equities market participant I should have made time to see Lehman Brothers earlier. I think logistics and its length had put me off.

I’m glad I went. In part because I certainly feel there is room for more plays about financial markets.

My arguments would be that financial markets as a human construct reflect much and enable much of what human society does… the good, the bad, the ugly; the sublime, the silly, the pointless and that markets are powered by people and people are all of that.

Dramaturgically, it was insightful to observe that the vast amounts of expositional story telling - performed well written sharply - was often gripping to many.

(Not all, as some were switched off; and not at all moments - perhaps the difficulty of the story).

In many ways, the direct to audience story telling is a technique I use in both my latest shows - and stand up comedy uses it as its major technique - but I’ve sometimes been cautious as to how well it will hold.

I’m now convinced that good writing and performance can hold it well.

The live music provided emotional and dramatic counter point. I found those aspects of the theatre instructive. (Although I have minor quibbles with some aspects of the performative story telling; a little too much one note shouting in places; not enough use of the quiet).

In terms of finance and economic history, or even the cultural history of persons then I learned new things in the first act about immigration, Jewish culture, slavery, cotton and the civil war. I could even draw some links even when there were not overt references.

You’d still learn more from a history book if the time or on economic history by listening to my podcast with, for instance, Mark Koyama (!).

These ideas weakened in act two and were very slim in the last act.

The play tackles the financialization (money!) of real goods (eg cotton!) with a passage about words which hints of the truth.

The Lehman brothers trading in the words of cotton. There is no cotton but the word cotton. There is no coffee but the word coffee.

This abstraction is true and not true on many levels and I liked it. Mathematics is a language that seems to describe properties of how we perceive the real world. Mathematics is not the real world. A contract on coffee is not coffee, but it represents how coffee will trade.

Financial market contracts or the words between men - are a human language construct that allows the movement, trade and manufacture of real goods like cotton to be turned into shirts - which people can buy for a promise (a money note) - to wear to keep them warm or to signal their desirability.

They are a language of trust. They are not - mostly - a description of the “real world”.

But I bring my views to that. The play touched only lightly on what financialisation of goods might mean and how it comes about.

That was even weaker in the third act suggesting that computer magic - buying numbers low and selling numbers high - was at the heart of trading - the universal language of computers.

I think you could argue this - I would not buy this but there could be an element of truth that trading is this human construct - but the play did not - more stating it as the truth of what these financial players were doing.

I was disappointed but heartened to find this lacuna - because it means there is still a play for me to write.

The other disappointment in particular into act 3 is the increasingly perfunctory treatment of the personality and characters.

I think liberties with the timelines for dramatic effect would be reasonable. Robert - Bobby - Lehman died in 1969 and wasn’t dancing, right to the end of Lehman Bros.

The most famous dancing metaphor was given by Citigroup CEO/Chair, Chuck Prince around 2007.

"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."

One small example on the characters:

Pete Peterson was given one short main scene - one that was mean to represent an internal political battles.

But Peterson went on into government and then on to found one of the biggest and most influential private equity firm in the world today. He became a billionaire and a major billionaire philanthropist- in that other grand graduation.

the strong links between finance and politics - foreshadowed by Herbert Lehman in the 1930s - and even before in the links of the civil war, north and south - New York - Alabama -

were absent into Act 3 -

If people think this is the modern day story of finance - with politics absent - then people are missing a major piece of the stroy.

The play makes the arguments in Act 2 that banks were going to fail before the government would step in to help the stronger remaining banks to survive. This was in 1929

This same echo happened in 2008

Some of the players were the same - Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs -

Similarly the politicians involved - were surrounded by ex-finance people. Look them up.

There would have been a very true and lovely ellipsis pattern to this history if it had been more fully explored.

Dick Fuld and many of the 2008 players are still alive so perhaps that makes it harder.

Still for someone who had lived this history and see within it the echoes of a longer arc of history (and even echoes with today's bank runs) it was unsatisfactory.

That said, much of the play is narrated in a gripping fashion and it does bring some character to a world which really does bring the money for the rest of the world to function. So I think it’s recommended viewing.

On reading Tom Stoppard’s life

-Why are there so few rightwing playwrights?
-Good playwrights seem to see a lot of theatre
-I don’t want fame
-Theatremakers as not-writers

I never want to be so famous that someone will want to write a biography of me. Even a friendly biography must cover some light warts even if not deep scars. I

In my early years, I never read much biography or even non-fiction. Poems, plays, novels, graphic novels even. The world of imagination seemed the most exciting.

As I age, I read more non-fiction. Real life is some times more incredible than fiction. Where ideas come from has been of increasing interest to me as well as what the ideas or stories are themselves.

Tom Stoppard has been described by David Hare as “conservative with a small c” although I can see his politics are complex and don’t easily fit on a left-right scale.

Still this makes Stoppard one of the only 5% or maybe 10% of playwrights who could be viewed more right of centre - with particularly emphasis on freedoms and freedoms of speech.

I find this notable on many counts but first:

Why are so few playwrights right wing? If you take the recent UK and US elections or more broadly you had for example a 69 / 66 million split in favour of Biden over Trump that’s almost 50/50 whereas playwrights would by 95/5 I am guessing. Is this more pronounced in theatre writers over even other creative arts? I’m unsure.

But, then how interesting to have such a well regarded playwright be “small c conservative” - are there ideas we should confront ourselves with in particular, as Stoppard writes in theatre from such a theatrically under-represented tribe? These are not the extreme views of an Ezra Pound but a rightish-centre.

Secondly - the importance of letter writing within all this - both as a record of what was happening and as an important medium of the time - the 1950s,1960s - perhaps emails have replaced that now but there is an element that we seem to miss from those letter writing days. I would not swap it back and lose emails but there is a piece of slow thinking we would find helpful.

Stoppard seemed so fully immersed in theatre and arts - via journalism and meeting and conversation - in the 1950s and 1960s and of course beyond.

Theatre was particular exciting creative art of that time. The biographer Hermione Lee conjures up the theatre and artistic discourse of the time and extracts strangely intriguing patterns and details

Pinter was a figure of great interest to Stoppard, long before they became friends and fellow playwrights. He would never forget their first encounter, in January 1962. When, just over fifty years later, Stoppard was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, he began his acceptance speech with that memory. Pinter came to Bristol to see a student production of The Birthday Party for the Sunday Times Drama Festival. Stoppard found himself sitting behind him.
Thereupon I became distracted by the necessity of speaking to him. I needed an opening gambit, and started to consider several. So, when The Birthday Party – to which I gave as much of my attention as I could spare – was over, I tapped him on the shoulder, and – I’m sorry to say – spoke to him as follows: ‘Are you Harold Pinter or do you only look like him?’ He turned round and I got an early inkling of Harold Pinter’s unflinching, unswerving gaze. He said, ‘What?’ [This word performed by Stoppard in a low, sinister, threatening tone.] I don’t remember any more. Perhaps I fainted.
The next day, Pinter spoke to the drama students, and Stoppard was there with his notebook. His report (‘The Tense Present’), though unsigned, was unmistakeably his work. He described Pinter’s talk as ‘an erratic staccato of grudging self-exposure’. It had ended with an unidentified quotation: The fact would seem to be, if in my position one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to – I forget, no matter. Stoppard recognised this from Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, and finished the quotation in a footnote: ‘And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.’
So this piece in the Western Daily Press of 8 January 1962 is the first publication in which Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard are on the same page – all speaking, in their different ways, about the relationship between speech and silence. [My emphasis]
He noted that the student questions which followed Pinter’s talk ‘suggested respect, reverence, suspicion, antagonism and scant understanding. Mr Pinter remained polite.’ And he gave extracts from what Pinter had said, prefacing them with the phrase ‘Harold Pinter, he say:’ – as if listening to an oracle. These were some of the oracle’s words, as reported by an otherwise silent and anonymous Stoppard:
I’m going to make categorical statements which should not be taken as categorical.
If I were to state a moral precept, it would be: Beware of the writer who declares that his heart is in the right place and has it in full view. This is a body lost in an empty prison of cliché.
My characters tell me so much and no more.
Between my [knowledge] and what they say there lies a territory which is compulsory to explore … Not that I regard my characters as anarchic, out of control. I do the donkey work. The shaping is me.
[I do not agree] with the tendency to seek allegories in my plays.
There are two silences: one is where no word is spoken, and another where there is a torrent of words. The speech we hear is an indication of the speech we don’t hear … an anguished smokescreen, a constant stratagem to cover nakedness … What takes place in the silences is an evasion, a desperate rearguard action to keep ourselves to ourselves.
Of all these Pinter-statements, the one that stayed longest in his mind was: ‘Writing for me is a completely private activity … What I write is not obligated to anything other than to itself.’
He quoted it, half a century on, as a demonstration of the quality he most identified with Pinter: honesty.

How immersed in creative discourse are our greatest writers? It seems to me a great many of our playwrights are extremely immersed.

From Stoppard to Hare to Bennett to Pinter to Churchill to Ravenhill- I hear the stories of them going to, involving in and absorbing from the theatre. Even those who never go on the public record such as Caryl Churchill (who is one of the very few British writers who could possibly argue for more greatness than Stoppard in theatre) are seen heavily engaged.

Certain novelist seem to be able to be more recluse but it seems to me that theatre writers are in a constant conversation to form their work.

Tom Stoppard was very seriously involved in the craft of plays. He reviewed over 130 in a year in the early 1960s. He went over Godot line by line for a failed film adaptation. He wrote a lot. Saw a lot. And was friends with remarkable other artists ranging from O’toole in his early life (early 20s) to Pinter. He had a strong agent from early on (Kenneth Ewing).

He travelled fairly widely. I’m only in his early life but his immersion in the world of theatre and creative arts seemed very deep. That does bring me to advice I hear for young writers who want to be brilliant but who don’t see much theatre. It seems to me that within theatre at least - active involvement seems to be a helpful and maybe necessary step on a path to brilliance.

I think it’s noteworthy to dwell on what type of theatre maker Tom Stoppard is not. Stoppard is in “the playwright as the centre of the theatrework” tradition. There is a counter tradition from ensemble work or theatremaker not-as-playwright.

To me this was a running debate in the 2000s between David Eldridge and Chris Goode, in a series of blog conversations. It also influences my work today as I’ve produced work which arguably might fit in both traditions at times.

I won’t recount the debate here but there was a recent podcast* where Eldridge and Goode reconcile and reminisce on their respective views.

Coda one, while having a long running intense disagreements, I’m fairly neither would be considered rightwing theatre makers.

Coda two, biography Hermione Lee is in her own right an admired and accomplished biographer.

Links:

Blog on Goode + Eldridge

Amazon link to Hermione Lee’s biography on Stoppard