‘The Lehman Trilogy’ From Ideas To Sketches To Stage – A Photo Tour With Designer Es Devlin: Deadline Tony Watch Exclusive

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EXCLUSIVE: In this Deadline exclusive, Es Devlin, whose magnificent set for director Sam Mendes’ The Lehman Trilogy is nominated for a Tony Award, presents a series of sketches and photographs that provide insight into the development of what would become one of the Broadway season’s most stunning experiences.

From Mendes’ simple handwritten list of guiding principles to early sketches and subsequent photos, the gallery offers insight into a singular vision.For each image, Devlin provides a caption that offers background — including an early idea, later discarded, that would have featured a tightrope walker high above the audience. “We are all walkers on the precarious tightrope of ever more complex human systems,” she writes.In a neat summing-up of the visual power in Devlin’s set, the design magazine Wallpaper, writing shortly after the play opened on the West End in 2018, said,Few theatre sets deliver the modernist doctrine – form follows function – quite as effectively as Es Devlin’s revolving masterpiece for the National Theatre’s current hit The Lehman Trilogy, directed by Sam Mendes…This skeletal glass-and-steel structure plays a starring role: it’s the dynamic force that drives the characters, action and plot…Essentially a rotating glass box masquerading as the archetypal modern office, with video designer Luke Halls’ digital panorama projected zoetrope-like behind – it’s so much more than mere scene-setting backdrop, especially given the fact that the narrative traverses centuries and continents.

This skeletal glass-and-steel structure plays a starring role: it’s the dynamic force that drives the characters, action and plot from the expansive cotton fields of rural Alabama to the final day of reckoning in the