Lehman & poetic justice

There was a time when American readers kept pace with new plays, even if they didn’t live in New York or couldn’t afford tickets. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, published by Viking Press, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  made good money in hardcover and paperback for Atheneum.

When theatres went dark in March, good plays were left dangling early in their runs. Some will never re-emerge. One was the Italian writer Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy, a broad-backed epic about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers.

Mr Massini began writing this