Lulu, by Frank Wedekind, adapted by Anna Ledwich at the Gate Theatre, London, by Huntley Dent
Lulu
by Frank Wedekind
Gate Theatre
adapted and directed by Anna Ledwich
Sean Campion, Michael Colgan, Paul Copley, Helena Easton, Jack Gordon, Sinéad Matthews with Greer Dale-Foulkes and Tessa Sowery
Eternal feminine. One cannot leave the tiny Gate Theatre, hardly big enough to park two Smart Cars, without feeling almost violated by what went on inside. Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, a shocker since its premiere in 1894, searingly validates Freud’s comment that his entire work was anticipated by the poets. Everything you would be afraid to admit to a therapist is spelled out here in letters of fire. Lulu is a chaotic carnival of psychopathology, as charged as the unconscious and just as annihilating to reason. The loosely stitched plot is circular, like Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, in which one scene connects to the next by passing along a linking character. Here that character is Lulu herself, an erotic lightning rod in baby-doll panties who tempts three husbands, a father, two lovers, one of them a blackmailer, and a lesbian countess to their ruin.

