"For Mature audiences" only is an understatement. This production of Frank Wedekind's lurid play by the Almeida Theater is almost the mirror image of the previous Kennedy Center's UK celebration entry "The Mill On The Floss". "Mill" took a realistic George Eliot novel and brought it to life using all sorts of theatrical tricks. Here director Jonathan Kent takes this expressionistic play and makes it all to gritty and realistic.

The Lulu of the title walks the world of European high society, and there doesn't seem to be one man (and one Countess) who doesn’t fall under her spell. Sex is constantly on the minds of these characters, and with her rapidly shifting lovers in Act I, Lulu seems to be using sex as a weapon to get what she wants. By Act II, thanks to a growing list of crime and corpses in her wake, an older Lulu seems less in control of her fate and more a sexual puppet to the men who prey on her. Her downward spiral ends in a London dive with a paying customer I will simply call "Jack".

Almeida's production combines Wedekind's two "Lulu" plays and cuts over half of it out to get us to about three hours of intense sexual politics. But the adaptation works - while things move fast at times, one doesn’t feel one is missing a lot of scenes and information. It's a cold and calculating play, with Anna Friel making Lulu a wonderful Ice Princess who slowly starts to thaw as her fortunes dive. The remaining actors are well performed but they are often little more than Lulu's next victim, or victimizer. Still there is a hypnotic allure to the story, the course of the play.