March 18, 2001: Wedekind, Lulu
Almeida Theatre in temporary quarters. Translated by Wes Williams
Lulu, ultimate title of a play begun as Astarte, continued as Divine Birth, and completed as Pandora’s Box: A Monster Tragedy. Nicholas Wright, author of a play seen here in London last year, Cressida (which I didn’t like), adapted a “literal translation” (that banal oxymoron) by Wes Williams, for the Almeida Company in temporary quarters in the old coach station in Omega Place, off the Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, while the permanent house in Angel is extensively refurbished and rehabilitated.
When the stage is really opened up, in the last, “London,” act of the play, we realize how extraordinarily deep it is. The previous action, in Germany and Paris, has been played in a much shallower space, “curtained” off by a series of hinged, semi-translucent panels that part at the center and fold, accordion-like, back against what passes for a proscenium arch. It is basically a viable acting space, but something is not right acoustically; speech was not as distinct as it could be, and I failed (even with my aid in the right ear) to understand all that was said, especially by Lulu’s father, whose mushy speech was well-nigh unintelligible.
The center of interest is the title character, Lulu, a beautiful young woman who is, and has been from her childhood, a creature of men’s insatiable sexual desires. She is played by Anna Friel, an actress with a dark-eyed, sensual loveliness of face and a gorgeous body. The play has been in previews for a little while, but Friel apparently hurt her foot in rehearsals, and so press night and opening night were put off. It was a wise move; the production, which I saw just the day before press night, had not quite gelled; there were longueurs, particularly in the Paris (middle) section, where a long table, canted toward up left from near the center of the stage, did more to impede the action, by displacing most of it to stage right, than it helped to ground the general revelry of a decadent club clientele.
The story is a gruesome one: Lulu goes through a series of lovers and husbands — it is hard to tell one from the other — in Germany, Paris, and London, where the action moves as Lulu escapes the law, and as her fortunes, which early on were on the rise, rapidly decline. She ends in a tawdry, ill-lighted, unheated basement of a warehouse or some such derelict building (the old hull of a coach station coming ready-made for this setting) where she makes vain attempts to keep herself going from the meager proceeds of street prostitution, and where one of her customers turns out to be a violent misogynist-murderer who cuts her up in unspeakable ways and carries off his bloody trophy in a plastic bag to sell to a medical school.
Wedekind’s earlier title was on the mark: to come in contact with Lulu is to open a Pandora’s box of ills, and the resulting tragedy is indeed monstrous. But it is, as the program comments, an ambiguous p