The Crash

A once-shiny, now-bankrupt investment bank in the summer of 2008: A clean-up crew is tasked with picking up the shards left by the crash. Among paperwork, garbage and electrical scrap, the clean-up finds incriminating evidence against one of the securities traders. They weather their own chance for wealth – where one falls, the other rises. But the former employees of the bank also try to fight their way through the scheming thicket and save what is yet to be salvaged. The bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008 and the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment bank exposed a system that made winners at the expense of many individuals. In ‘The Crash’, British composer Russell Hepplewhite and American librettist Seth Bockley tackle this theme with a view to the individual fates of ordinary people – a darkly humorous farce about greed and humanity’s inability to learn from mistakes.