雷曼兄弟三部曲

2022.03.30，@北京剧院放映

看的时候感觉非常不一般，它的节奏是有层次有设计的，好像坐在一艘时间飞船上忽快忽慢地穿越时空。这种快慢给人的感觉，不是在浏览历史，而是在寻找什么东西。

豆瓣某高赞影评写的不错，把“那种神奇的感受”拆解得还蛮到位的。引用其中共鸣的几点：

① 时间感：“人物不断重复同一种行为……让时间呈现出一种虽然肉眼不可见，但存在感完全无法忽略的动态。玻璃搭设的舞台，把走马灯这种“观看”的质感格外强化出来。

② 历史厚度：“为这段家族兴衰史陪衬的背景是整个美国150年的战争与和平风情画……悲悯、浪漫、深沉与柔软，一直贯穿在这部史诗始终。”

B站找到一篇演后谈（https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1XK411G7d2），从导演和编剧的角度更细致地阐述了背后的故事。其中印象深刻的是：

① 这部剧的内核是关于传统、关于传承、关于家庭的，的确重点没有在金融风云和08年的事件上——而是在一切结束的那一天，让最开始的spirit回来重聚，讲述这一路如何走来。

② 外界对这部剧最高的评价大概是“戏剧最好的样子”。这到底指的是什么呢？看完之后我的理解是，冲破线性、把故事无数的多面性并置出来；把故事复杂的情绪，那些in your guts的东西，那些在思考、理解、评判之外的东西，以一个整体的方式传递出来——然后留给观众一个印象、一个种子、一个解读的起点。

③ 而形式，那个传递的方式，是巧妙的、愉悦的、审美的。经过反复的推演找到那个对的方式，会发现所有的要素开始有自己的生命力、开始自洽地产生意义（这个过程在很多讲“艺术”的抉择里似乎也是共通的~）。从这个角度看，通过3个演员身份的切换和并置、道具的象征和共存、音乐&台词的节奏感，这部剧真的做到了这种“最好的传递”。

演后谈全文整理翻译如下：

Sam Mendes and Ben Power on The Lehman Trilogy

主持人：Jenny Macintosh
对话：导演Sam Mendes & 编剧Ben Power
视频地址：https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1XK411G7d2

【Jenny】首先想问这部剧最开始的素材是怎么来的呢？这么问是因为，我们都认为自自己或多或少对雷曼兄弟有一些了解，因为（2008年雷曼兄弟破产）在过去十年里是我们生活中的一个标志性事件，但这部戏却并不是关于这个时刻的。因此我想首先了解的是，你们是如何找到这部作品的，它哪里吸引了你？

【Jenny】The source material for this? Becaues, we all think we know something about Lehman Brothers because it was such an iconic moment in all our lives ten years ago, but it was not what this play is about. So, firstly, where did you find it, and why did it draw you?

【Sam】我对这个主题一直很有兴趣。雷曼兄弟破产时我正好住在纽约。在那个周末政府看着它崩塌，那一天发生了什么深深吸引着我；同时我也对当时掌管雷曼兄弟的Dick Fuld很有兴趣。我想要尝试拍一部关于那个周末的电影，描述那一天一群人集合在一个房间里，几乎是有意地任凭这个银行毁灭。而在那之后引发了巨大的金融危机，产生了波及全球的深远影响，一直到今天。

【Sam】I was always fascinated, I was living in New York when the Lehman Brothers collapse. I was particulary gripped by the weekend in which the government allowed them to fall apart. I was particularly fascinated by Dick Fuld, who was then running Lehman Brothers. And I want to try and make a film about that weekend, on which that a group of people gathered in a room and effectively triggered, almost deliberately, allowed a bank to collapse, which then triggered a huge finance crisis, and had a global ramifications to this day.

我在墨西哥拍摄幽灵党时，有一次我有点想家，就读起了卫报。我读到一条Luca Ronconi的讣告。他是一位非常优秀的意大利戏剧导演，我曾和他见过几面。那篇讣告的最后写到，“Ronconi最后的作品是在米兰Piccolo剧院上映的雷曼兄弟三部曲”。我心想，哇哦有点意思，这部剧的主题难不成和我想拍的那个电影是一样的。于是我给这部剧的意大利作者Stefano Massini打了个电话，问能否给我一份这部剧的剧本。他说，抱歉没有翻译成英文的版本，但我可以给你寄一份意大利文的。

于是我找了一个文本翻译，我拿到的东西甚至更应该叫做诗歌，如史诗一般宏大的诗歌。在我看来它完全不像是一部戏，完全没有指明说话人，没有说明是谁说了哪一段台词——它就是一大段的文本，但即使是在文本翻译下，这些文本也是如此的精妙诱人。

Then I was in Mexico city making Specter. I was a bit homesick, I was reading the Guardian, and I read an obituary of Luca Ronconi, the great Italian theatre director, who I had met a few times. I was reading it, and right at the bottom it said, Ronconi's final production was of the Lehman Trilogy at Piccolo Theatre in Milan, and I thought 'Woo, that sounds interesting, that's probably a play about what I want to make a movie about'. So I called the agent of the Italian writer, Stefano Massini. And I said 'Could I get a copy of the play?', and He said, ‘There is no English translation, but I can send you the Italian text.'

I had to commission a literal translation, and there came back this, effectively, poem, this large epic poem — with no indicated speakers at all. It didn't look like a play to me, it just look like a big junk of text. It didn't say who said what lines, it didn't say anything at all, it was just text — fascinating text, even in a literal translation.

最后我给作者Stefano打了个电话，我问他这这样的文本要怎么用。Stefano很有个性，他的英文很差，在电话里讲话要非常非常慢…最后我们终于沟通清楚了，他说，“这由你来决定谁说哪句台词。我们在米兰用了12个演员，但之后在巴黎用了9个，在德国不同的城市演员的数量也不同。”

于是我把这个剧本拿给Ben，我们一起到国家剧院工作室开展了2周工作坊，当时用了和米兰一样数量的12个演员——12个非常优秀的、各种各样的演员，有男有女，和他们在米兰时做的一样。这就是我们怎么启动的，从一个粗糙的文本翻译和完全复制米兰版的对话方式开始。我们尝试把它变得更像一个戏剧。

So finally, I call the writer Stefano, 'How did you do this'? Stefeno is quite a character, I mean, his English is very poor, you have to talk very slowly on the phone……We managed to get to the bottom of it, and he basically said, 'You decide who says what. We did it in Milan with 12 actors, but since the it's been in Paris with 9 actors, and in various city around Germany with a variety different people playing the roles'.

And I brought it to Ben, and I said, let he and I go to National Theatre Studio for two weeks, with the same numbers of actors that they did in Milan. So 12 actors, we started with 12 actors, very fine actors, mixed, male and female, as they did it in Milan. That's how we started the process, with just raw literal translation, and exactly who said what in Milan. We tried to work out how it felt like a play.

【Ben】用奇怪来形容原版材料真的毫不夸张。就像Sam说的那样，没有明确地指出哪个角色在说话，没有舞台说明。整个文本就像诗歌那样被切割成章节，之间有一些奇怪的标题，无法破译的、晦涩隐喻的标题。

【Ben】It is impossible to overstate what a strange document it is in the original. As Sam says, charactors are not given specified who's speaking, there is no stage direction. The thing is cutting into chapters, like poems, some with strange title, completely impossible to decipher, metaphorical titles.

Sam跟我说到这个项目的时候，我觉得我是很喜欢金融剧的。我在去国家剧院之前，参与过一部讲安然公司的巨作，那部剧很成功，它切入到内部的视角讲述了公司瓦解时的故事。我也看过关于雷曼兄弟的BBC剧目，讲述了2008年的故事——但这部剧从1844年开始，在那份意大利文稿中几乎没有提到关于破产的事情，如此庞大的巨作只是在最后的结尾几页写到了。

但是透过它的文本节奏、透过它的诗意、透过语言、透过重复，甚至就透过直译的文本，有一些难以置信的、令人想要表达的东西透出来。直译文本是很难搞的东西，它们总是非常模糊，语义不通常。但这份文稿，在直译文本里已经能看到那些触动人心的时刻，当演员第一次说出台词的时候我们就感受到了——即使很多的文本如沼泽一般混沌，但那个时刻混沌消失了，仿佛在泥沙中淘到了金子的那一刻。

When Sam talked me about the project, I thought I love film plays about finance. I worked on a play called Enron before I started at the National. It is huge and success, and it went inside the belly of that company as it was falling apart. I'd seen the BBC drama about Lehman, about what happened in 2008——and this play begins in 1844, there is very little reference in the Italian document, very little reference to the bankruptcy at all——only in the final pages of a huge weighty tome.

But there is something in the rhythms, in the poetry, in the language, in the repetition, there is incredibly speakable, and even in the literal. Literal translations are really difficult objects, because they are clumsy, the don't work, but this, already, even in the literal, there are moments, and we felt it in that the first time we heard actors saying it. Lots of it was sort of murky and swampy, but then these flights, when you just went 'Oh no, this is... the stuff is gold here!'

【Jenny】所以你们工作坊刚开始的时候是有12个演员的。我有个简单的问题是，你们怎么就从12个人变成了3个人？以及为什么这样做呢？

【Jenny】So you were in the studio with 12 actors. I suppose the simple question is how did you get from 12 to 3, and why?

【Sam】我刚才没有讲到，我在这篇文稿里实际读到的内容，和我一开始以为的自己会读到的主题完全不一样。它不是关于倒闭的那个周末，不是关于我之前理解的雷曼兄弟——而是关于传统，关于传承，关于家庭的。

实际上，在这个故事里我们知道最终的结果，但它讲述的是事情是怎样一步一步变成这样的。我想，正是这一点打动了我。

【Sam】The first thing to say is, which we sort of skipped, what I thought I was going to read, was not what I read at all, thematically and in terms of subject matter. It wasn't about the weekend of the collapse. It wasn't about Lehman Brothers as I had taken to be. It's about tradition, it's about legacy, it's about family. In actual fact, it took as read, as you did at the beginning of this, the fact that we know the end result, but it showed us how we got to that point. And I suppoes that really struck me, so I felt like...

但我并不知道要怎样在舞台上去呈现它。我一开始感觉，这会是一个小剧场里的大制作，但经过了那2周工作坊的讨论，我觉得它应该是一个大剧场里的小制作——剧本中的那种史诗气质似乎需要一种广阔宏大的视觉表达，但故事的内核最好就只是由这三兄弟传递出来。如果有可能的话，就由他们去扮演其他每个角色——我们总会找到有格调的方式实现它。

最终我们采用了一种更表现主义的方式，而不是之前的版本中采用的那种更写实主义的方式。当然这个剧本身绝不是一部写实主义的剧，但每个角色由一个单独的演员来扮演的方式，总归是相对更写实的。

However I didn't know is was going to work, I went into it feeling it was a large cast in a small theatre, And I came out of that 2-week process, feeling it was a small cast in a large theatre. And the epic natural of the material seemed to ask for a big visual statement, but the core of the story was best delivered by just the three brothers. And if it was possible for them to play every signal role, somehow we could find a stylist way into it, which was more articulate than the more naturalistic route they had taken. It was never a natrualistic play, but it was certainly more naturalistic when each new character is played by a new actor.

【Jenny】所以Ben，说实话，当时你有没有觉得他（Sam）疯了？

【Jenny】So Ben, just for the record, did you think he was bonkers?

【Ben】有，也没有。这么说可能有点马后炮，但我是这么认为的，这部剧最开始的部分是最好理解的，立刻就能打动人——它就讲述了三个男孩从白手起家的创业故事，咸鱼翻身的传说故事。

因此就像Sam说的，这里的关键问题是，”我们为什么要关心三个亿万富翁和他们的麻烦事儿？” 我们最终决定用3个演员，当然也就意味着，所有的事情都可以从最初的这三个主人公的视角中延续下去，他们经历了整个故事。即使他们在扮演着他们的孩子和孙子，他们的意志依然留在舞台上——我们看着Henry Lehman变成了Philip Lehman，但Henry Lehman并没有消失不见。

通过只用3个演员这种方式，我们让Henry、Emanuel和Mayer也经历了那个夜晚，而最初的那个东西，一开始三兄弟之间的情感链接，也同样延续了下来。甚至当我们讨论他们的后代们——住在纽约、非常富有而成功的后代们，依然会想到那个初来美国的男孩，穿着新鞋站在码头，身无一物不会说英文的男孩。

【Ben】Yes and no. What I think, maybe this is hindsight, but i did... it's always been true that the early stage of the play were the easiest to read, and the most immediately effective, becaues it's three boys with nothing trying to do something, it's a scrappy underdog tale.

So, as Sam saids, the problem of 'why do we care about billionares and their terrible troubles', it's a problem in that bit. And actually, of course, the decision to move to three, means that the whole things goes through the eyes of those original protagonists, the whole story is experienced by them. Even as they're also playing their children and grandchildren, their sense of it is alive on stage. We watch Henry Lehman becoming Philip Lehman, and Henry Lehman doesn't disappear.

By making it into three, you allow Henry, Emanuel and Mayer to live through the evening, and that initial thing, the emotional connection that those brothers have at the begginning, sustains. And even when we talking about their children and grandchildren——in New York, very wealthy, very successful——still there is the boy in his new shoes, standing on the dockside, with no belongs, no English.

【Jenny】这部剧最震撼的地方之一是它呈现的这个过程：一开始三兄弟带来了属于他们的惯例和信仰，接着随着剧情发展这个体系逐渐淡化——一些渐渐消失了，一些演变成了其他的东西。这些是都写在剧本的文本里，还是你在解读文本的过程中发现需要着重强化的东西？

【Jenny】One of the things that's very striking about the production, particularly early on, is the... the gradual, well firstly, the bringing on of the ritual and the belief system that the brothers have brought with them, and then the way that mutates throught the play, and gradually, some of the ritual falls away and some of it turns into other things. Was that all written into the text, or was that something you found in the process of working the text, the extend to which you need to accentuate those issues?

【Ben】那个真相一直在那儿，不过在全本中确实是无形的。调整剧本的过程，可以说就是努力去看清楚那个内核结构，然后准确地强调它、深化它的过程。举个例子，剧中3次近亲守丧（sittingshiva）持续的时间一次一次在缩短，最终不再花费时间。这是非常核心的点，它以最优美的方式展示了这个家庭从一个局外人变成创立者，却反而失去了家园的过程，展示了信仰缺失、迷失自我的故事内核。

【Ben】I mean the truth is there, it's all there. But it was... it did feel shapeless in it's full length. The process of adapting it was really the process of trying to see that architecture, and then really accent it and lean into it. So for instance, the sitting of Shiva three times during the play, for less and less time, and then eventually, no time at all. That was completely central, and like the most beautiful essentializedversion of that loss of faith, that loss of self, that loss of home that happens as this family goes from being outsiders to being the establishment.

有意思的是，工作坊之后我开始着手翻译，重写直译的内容，让英文的表达更准确。然后我遇到了很多不懂的地方，于是我到佛罗伦萨去找那个意大利作者Massini，和他一起住了3天。

我们通过翻译交流（因为他的英文水平和我的意大利语水平都太有限了，没法直接对话）。我们坐在他佛罗伦萨的家里，我让他给我解释这个是什么那个是什么，为什么火车像上帝把戒律给到摩西时它在天空中呈现的样子，这都是什么逻辑？

直到我和他见面之后，听他讲了他的犹太背景，才明白为什么这个人——这个40出头、住在意大利的演员/作家/导演，会在08年危机发生之后，感到必须要把这整个家族的故事讲出来。

I mean, what was fascinating for me was that I went, so, after the workshop I began to make a translation, take the literal and rewrite it, make it something that worked in English.

There were lots of bits that I didn't understand, so I went to Florence, where Massini, the Italian playwrite lives, and spend three days with him, ask him through a translator (because his English... well his English is better than my Italian, but neither were strong enough to conduct a conversation).

But we sat in his house in Florence, and I said, 'you have to explain to me what this is, why is the trains like the appearence of the commandments in the sky, when god gives it to Moses, how does this work’? It was only when I met him and he told me about his jewishness, which then revealed why this man, this actor-writer-director, in his 40s living in Italy, had felt after the crush in 2008, like he needed to tell the story, and tell the whole story of this family.

我简单讲下这个有意思的事情，Massini在一个意大利的天主教家庭长大，他的父亲在米兰做生意，开办一家工厂。有一天，父亲厂里的一个犹太工人病倒了，是他的父亲做了紧急救护，救了犹太人的命。那时候才10岁的Massini是个小地痞，在学校有很严重的问题。几个月之后，恢复健康的犹太人来到Massini家里，对他的父亲说：“您救了我的命，在我们犹太人的信仰里，您就是荣誉犹太人了，我们的族群欢迎您。告诉我可以为您做些什么，您现在有遇到什么麻烦吗？” “我唯一的麻烦就是，我有一个9岁的儿子不务正业。”“那么，让他跟我一起去犹太教会学校吧！”

于是，Massini的整个青少年时期，上午接受天主教教育，下午接受犹太教教育——于是就有了今天如此非凡的他。我实在是没法完全公正地评价他。我认为理解他和犹太人之间这种奇特的“局外—局内”的连接关系，才能更好地理解这部剧里发生的事情——理解这里面对塔木德和托拉的引用，以及贯穿全剧的那种犹太教的感觉。

And I will tell you the story very very quickly, but it's fascinating. He was raised as an Italian catholic, his father was a businessman in Milan, owned a factory. One day, one of the jewish workers in his father's factory collapsed, and his father administered first aid, and saved the man's life. Stefano, at this point, was ten years old, and was a tearaway, in terrible trouble at school. And months later, the man, now recovered, came to the Massini House, and said to Stefano Massini's father, 'You saved my life. I'm Jeweish, that means in my faith, you are an honorary Jew. I accept you in my community. Tell me what I can do to help you. What problems do you have?’ 'The only problem I have is my tearaway 9-years-old son.' 'Well then, he's coming with me, to synagogue school.’

And Massini then, through his teens, was educated catholic in the moring, and jewish in the afternoon, and so this... He's just the most extraordinary man! I really can't do him justice, but he had this strange outsider-insider connection to jewishness, which I think explains a lot about what is going on here in the play, with those Talmudic Torah references, and the sense of jewish faith that goes all the way through it.

【Jenny】台词很具有音乐性，里面有那种有节律的重复，作为观众很快就能沉浸带入进去。这种节奏感，它是本来就在那，你只是打磨前后的语句来凸显它？还是随着你的编排过程，它才自己浮现出来的？

【Jenny】There's a kind of musicality to the text, and some rythmic repetitions, that as a listener, as an autdience member, you start to get very beguiled by as it goes on. Was that there, and were you just carving away materials around it to reveal that? Or, was it something that revealed itself as you made the version?

【Sam】在我们决定要用3个人的那个工作坊之后，我们确定了3个关键的演员，之后我们和他们三一起又开展了另一个工作坊，尝试台词排练，看看怎么做更好。那一次我们的舞台设计师设计了一个布景模型，但最开始按照我的要求，这个模型师是静态的，一个静止的办公室。和现在舞台上的这一版很像，但是没有这个可以旋转的空间。

【Sam】Well, I think, there was another workshop, after when we decide we were going to just do it with three people, and we had cast our magnificent three actors, and we managed to make a week where they were all free, and we could try out the text, and see how it would work. And we had a model, our designer designed it, but she had designed a staic - as I requested from her initially - a static office, which was very much like this but without, with those of you who haven't seen it, this cube revolves.

可以看到后面还有两个房间，我们叫做爸爸房、妈妈房和儿童房。那一周的工作坊里还发生了一件事，我开始越来越清晰地觉得，这部剧实际上还需要另一个层面的沟通方式，一种更加律动的、音乐性的方式。在这个层面上，形式随着时间的流逝而变化，通过这种变化，历史的变迁能够被直接感受到，而不仅仅是去理解或解释。

工作坊的结尾我跟舞台设计师ES说，我觉得我们不应该用静态的布景，我们得想办法让舞台动起来。她一如既往地淡定地说：“好，那我们试试别的”。下一次我再看到舞台的时候，她已经非常高效地把原来那个只有纽约城市布景的玻璃办公室，变成了一个玻璃立方体，或者说一个四方空间。

You can see there are two other rooms at the back, we call them the daddy room, the mummy room and the baby room. One of the things again that happened in that week is that it seemed rather clear to me that, actually, there is a level of communicaiton the play needed, which was a rhythmic, musical communication — a way in which the shape moved as history moved, the shape of the play was felt the shape of history was felt, rather than just understood or explained.

So, that again, emerged, by the end of that week, I said to ES: 'I don't think that we can do it in a static set. I think we have to find a way for this world to move.' And in her own, inimitable way, she was completely unfazed by it, as always: 'OK, fine, let's do something else.' And next time I went in, she'd turned what was a glass office that just had a view back over New York, into a glass cube, effectively, or a four-sided space.

排练的过程常常需要处理一些一个复杂的、仓促的问题（我想BEN能理解我在说的），一些情况下台词文本并不是最首要的。这个过程里，我时常觉得自己是在设计一个作品，一个编舞的、音乐的作品，而这不是我所擅长的。这个作品的律动似乎有它自己的诉求，它需要呼吸，它在时间中大幅度地跳跃——它会需要15分钟来展示历史中一个小小的点，然后用2分钟快速略过内战时期，甚至略过整个二战。

But rehearsing it, rehearsing the play, felt at times (and I know Ben will understand this), having worked with complicate and headlong, and in situations where the text is not always paramount - it feels almost like devising a piece, which is not something familiar to me but choreographically and musically. The rhythm of the piece, seemed to have it's own demands. It needs to breath in and breath out. It takes huge leaps of time, but then it will spend 15min on a tiny little point in history, but it will leap over the Civil War in 2min, or jump entirely the 2nd World War.

【Ben】这部剧文本的整体表达方式上，预言了围绕舞台发生的所有事情，因此会有种”所有的时刻都被糅在一起”的感觉。另外，剧中的音乐也很值得一提，在排练室里，我们非凡的作曲家Nick Powell一直和Sam以及三位演员在一起，他坐在钢琴边现场作曲，来配合演员的表演。看过演出的人应该能体会到，音乐是如何地和表演融为一体。

【Ben】The whole of the text that is in this production, was made very pre-spoke for everything that's happening on stage around it, so every moment it's packed. And it's probably worth mentioning music in that as well, because in the rehearsal room, alongside Sam, the three actors, Nick Powell, the extraordinary composer, is just there at his piano, composing live to accompany the action. Those of you who've seen it will know how integral the music is to it.

【Jenny】看过演出的人应该也发现了，钢琴家就坐在台下这个位置。她就是整场演出的第四位演员，不是么？

【Jenny】For those of you who've seen it, you'll know that the pianist is downstage here, and she is the fourth member of the company, isn't she?

【Sam】她的旋律把独立的单词串联编织起来了，这是非常非常精细的活儿——是的，她就是今晚的第四个角色。

【Sam】She's weaving the themes around often individual words, and it's very very precise, but that is the fourth character in the evening.

【Jenny】Sam，前面你提到了舞台设计。当我们看向这个舞台，一方面它很庞大，但另一方面它有极其简单。演员几乎没有用到什么道具，就只是几个箱子和椅子挪来挪去，其他基本上没有别的什么了。你原本想象中就是这样的吗？

【Jenny】You've talked about the design, Sam, and when you look at this thing — it's huge, somehow, but then, also, it's incredibly simple. The actors have very very few props, they've got a few box to move around, and chairs, but there's very little. Is that how you imagined it?

【Sam】这个蛮有意思的，我想我们一开始决定了，要尝试只用现代的办公室里有的东西来讲述这个故事。接着，随之而来的是，我们写了一个开场白和一个结束语。

一开始的设想是，这个故事从一个什么都没有的舞台开始，一个男人走上来，说，“一个行过割礼的犹太人站在纽约港4号码头，身边只有一个行李箱……”——这是故事的开始。他其实是一个鬼魂。这是雷曼兄弟破产的前夜，晚上的办公室锁起来了。随着夜晚的降临，三兄弟从遥远的过去来到了这个上锁的办公室，来告诉你发生了什么、为什么成了现在的样子。最后，当黎明破晓时，他们消失了，办公室又重新锁了起来。

【Sam】I think we decided that we would do... that it was interesting, if we were able to tell the story only with what's in a contemporary office, but that decision followed us writing, effectively, a prologue and an epilogue.

So the play simpley starts on an empty stage, the original play starts on an empty stage with a man walking on saying, 'a circumcised Jew, with only one piece of luggage at his side, dock number four in the port of New York' —— and that's how it starts. Here, he is, effectively, a ghost, you start on the eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the office is locked up for the night, and during the course of the night, in which it's locked up, effectively, three people come back from the past, to tell you what happened and how they got there, and they disappear at the end when the dawn breaks, and the office is unlocked again.

当Ben和我构想出这个框架时，我们一度觉得“这会不会太过了“？然后我们想到，如果所有用来讲述这个故事的道具都是那一天在办公室里的东西，那么这个概念就能说得通了。

So once Ben and i had come up with that as a framework, and thought, 'can we push it that far'? It then seemed to make sense conceptually, that everything that is used to tell the story, would have been in the office that day.

从无到有的创作过程让人很有满足感。例如，剧中所有的资料和文件，都只是雷曼兄弟破产的周末那一期的《纽约时报》——从铁路计划书，到每一份签署的文件，包括最后那张报纸本身。一个道具可以拥有很多重的含义，这只是其中一个小小的例子。

那些箱子也是一样。我们熟悉那些箱子，它们是雷曼兄弟破产时员工们手里拿的箱子，那个时候在很多照片上都能看到它们。而现在，它们被困在这一个小房间里，随着夜晚的流逝被用来代表各种时期的箱子、或是象征一些其他的东西。

And there is a great satisfaction, of course, in making something out of nothing. Every document, every piece of paper is, in fact, just a copy of the New York Times from the weekend that Lehman Brothers collapsed, from the plans of the railways, to any number of the documents that are being signed, to papers themselves. So that's just a small example of how one prop can hold a multitude of meanings.

The same with the boxes, that we are all familiar with. Those boxes were carried out by the Lehman employees. We saw many photographs of them at the time, and they're all stucked up in a small room, and they're used to build both literal and metaphorical things, in the course of the evening.

看看我们到底能走多远，是排练过程的乐趣之一。过了一步，你会觉得有点太自我，太明显的表演感；差一步的话，又会觉得除了台词之外对整部剧的把控还不够。因此，我们是在试图把历史变得有形，试图去理解心里的那个东西同时理解脑中的那个东西。然后，当你创造的东西开始向你喊出答案——而那个答案可能你自己都还没有意识到，那时候你就会知道你做到了。

And that's one of the pleasure of rehearsing it, to see how far you could push it. One step too far, and you felt a little self-conscious, alittle too obviously theatrical; not enough, and you didn't feel that they were controlling it in ways other than verbal. So, it's trying to make concrete the shape of history, trying to understang something in your gut, at the same time as understanding it in your head. You know it's working when the machine you built starts to yeild the answers when you don't have them, right?

【Ben】你知道么，从我的角度出发，看着Sam和ES以及设计团队一点点解决这些问题，是一件很有意思的事情。比如那个招牌，在Massini的意大利原文里面可以看到，更换招牌是一条清晰的线索。如果布景是玻璃做的，那么我们要在玻璃上挂东西吗？或者我们放一个白板？不，我们把招牌在玻璃上写出来！而一旦决定这样做，一旦意识到我们要在玻璃上一个一个地增加招牌，就会发现——他们在1840年写的招牌，到了1950年还会在那里，半透明的招牌就像鬼魂一样立在那些争吵的人们身后。这时你会觉得，（一切都对路了）。

【Ben】You know, the pleasure from siitng in my seat watching Sam and ES, and the design team solving these things, things like... the signs, so, it's clear in the Italian text, that changing signs was something that Massiini had seen to chart. The set's going to be made of glass, are we going to hang things? Is there going to be a whiteboard? No, we're going to write it on the glass! And of course, as soon as you do it, as soon as you realize that you're going to accumulate this stuff on the glass, that the signs they write in the 1840s, can still be there, semi-transparent, ghosts behind the men arguing in the 1950s, then you ... (breath).

如果你找到了对的出发点，会有很多类似这样的发现。我们的出发点，那个办公室的故事框架，其实是在所有的事情之前就确定了的——在我们决定用3个演员之前，在我们决定要有钢琴之前，在有这个、有那个之前。

我想，形成这个框架的根源是，我们知道必须要以某种方式让2008年呈现在这个舞台上——即使原作者Stefano Massini对这一天的事情并没有什么兴趣。我们推测观众需要感受到台上发生的一切和最后破产这一天的关系。

因为做这部戏的初衷是，就像Sam说的，雷曼兄弟破产开启了一个新的时代，它产生的一系列后果至今波及影响全世界。因此可以说，2008年才是一切，把2008年保存在这个房间里更能触动到观众，也会持续地让整个故事更有代入感。

And these are discoveries that you make if you got the right starting point. And the starting point of the framework of the boardroom, which actually came before everything - before there were three actors, before there was a pianist. 'before there was this, there was that...'

I think it probably came from the fact that we knew that we had to somehow keep 2008 alive, even though Stefano Massini wasn't as interested in it, as we suspected audience would want the relationship to the crash.

Because why are we doing the play? We are doing the play because, as Sam says, a decade on. The world live with the consequences of the decision to let Lehman go bankrupt. And so, 2008 was everything, and to hold the evening inside this room, feel effective, and it kept giving, as Sam says, to the whole story.

【Jenny】从最开始你们拿到的材料，到它现在呈现的样子，这个演变的过程真是很有趣~！你设想中它未来会迭代成什么样子呢？

【Jenny】It's such an interesting evolution, from the material that you came across in the first place to where it is now. Can you envisage further iterations of it?

【Ben】如果我在Twitter上搜自己以及和自己相关的作品（当然我不是那种人），我会看到Twitter上每天都有各种相关的消息。有时候是看过我们这一版的人在讨论它，但在西班牙的Twitter以及西班牙版的演出照片里，会发现他们这版和我们这版看起来完全不一样——他们用了很多的演员。而在葡萄牙是以音乐剧的形式上演，意大利也有一个新的版本开幕……

我想，从Sam对Stefano剧本开放性的描述里看到，不同的人对他的剧本尝试了不同的呈现方式，说明了这是一个在全世界范围内都会非常非常受欢迎、具有普世意义的剧本。这个版本只是我们的版本，是第一个英文版本，但我相信这部剧到了世界各地，面对不同的观众，会有不同的表达方式。

【Ben】If i was the person who searched for myself on Twitter, and for the productions that i'm involved with - which of course i'm not - then I could discover everyday on Twitter reports, you know, sometimes there are people who have seen our show, talking about it. But then, all of these Spanish reports, and pictures of the Spanish production that's just opening, looks completely different. it's got loads of people in it. There is a musical in Portugal, there is another production opening in Italy...

I think that, the way Sam describe Stefano's openness, with the way different practitioners want to treat his text, means that it is going to be a very, very popular text all over the world. This version is our version, you know, it's the first version in English, but I think the play lives in different ways, for different audiences, all over the place.

【Jenny】这部剧绝对可以说是，”以最优美的方式呈现了戏剧何以是戏剧“的典范。它阐释了所有戏剧能带给我们的技法、精巧、和其他各种的美好。非常感谢你们！（对观众）也感谢你们！

【Jenny】This piece of work is absolutely the most beautiful exemplar of why theatre is theatre. And it demonstrates every skill, every craft, every good instinct that theatre can give us. And for that, and for many things more, thank you very much. (To audience) and thank you to you!