Every play about the financial crash of 2008 is ultimately asking the question “How did this happen?” Stefano Massini’s triptych (it’s not quite a trilogy as such: its constituent parts will never be presented as standalones) focuses on the first domino to fall, Lehman Brothers. However, Massini chronicles the company from its foundation in 1844 as a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama by Henry (né Chaim) Lehman, the first of three Bavarian-Jewish brothers to emigrate to the new world. In following the brothers’ move into commodity dealing and thence to finance, and the changes of focus and philosophy down the generations and into a post-family-run era, the “How did this happen?” inquiry comes to apply not to the 2008 disaster but to capitalism itself.

This is an audacious widening of the canvas. Also daring is to tell this tale, over nearly three hours of playing time, with only three actors, who begin as the original brothers – Simon Russell Beale as Henry, Ben Miles as Emanuel, Adam Godley as Mayer – but morph into descendants and supporting characters as required. (There is a brief, beautiful moment when Beale, having just had to do a turn as a diffident eight-year-old, glares balefully at the other two for forcing it on him.) The material itself is discreetly patterned, from the Hebrew phrase “Baruch HaShem” to an occasional rhetorical use of the “rule of three”.

Sam Mendes’ production plugs firmly into the storytelling aspect of which this patterning is one component. The actors remain in effectively the same costumes throughout, so that the brothers remain constant presences in the story even after their own era. Es Devlin’s set is a glass-walled contemporary office/boardroom which periodically revolves, in which the trio build props and rostra for themselves out of archive boxes containing, we infer, the papers of the soon-to-be-declared-bankrupt company. This is a staging, and a batch of performances, of intelligence, sensitivity and beauty.

Whether the work achieves its goal, however, is a different matter. We see the development of Lehman business, but never with a significant sense of the why or how of it. It’s not quite a fairy tale – there is no element of supernaturalism to it – but time and again it seems that events and circumstances, talents and ideas simply coincide... let’s say “serendipitously” rather than “magically”.

There are magnificent instants, such as the interview in which the Lehmans are asked what the core ingredient is of their commercial recipe and Emanuel’s son Philip (Beale again) replies epigrammatically, “Our flour is money.” It elegantly pinpoints the moment at which identifiable products became secondary to the company vision, but it does nothing to explain it. Matters begin to grow more vague and impressionistic through Black Tuesday in 1929, to the company’s adoption of and domination by trading rather than investment, and particularly with the introduction of the philosophy that buying is a good in itself. By the end, everyone on stage is dancing symbolically without particularly bothering to tether the symbol to any actuality.

When the piece comes close to explaining theories of value, it also hints at the reason why, ultimately, Massini’s attempt fails. We would not be interested in the story of these three Lehman brothers if we had not already been made aware of the importance of the end of the story of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. As such, the tale has no intrinsic value as a substance, nor any conferred market value as a tradable good; its value is declared only. Philip Lehman would surely have avoided dealing in that kind of thing.

Written for the Financial Times.