The Mail on Sunday "Lulu" Review - 25 March 2001

Slinky, sexy but this tart has no art

Let me explain. This week, in a converted bus station in one of the seediest, scariest bits of the capital, Anna Friel made her London stage debut as the uninhibited ingenue Lulu, the title role of German Frank Wedekind's amoral and sexually explicit shocker.

The bus station is the Almeida Theatre's temporary venue while their Islington space is renovated, and it's an exciting space, created with typical Almeida flair. The auditorium is wide-angled, the seats comfy; it is dark and has a curiously subterranean feel, more like a cinema.

The chance to see Friel in the flesh - and the word exploitation does spring to mind - has made Lulu a pretty hot ticket. Certainly, she couldn't be slinkier or sexier: naked beneath diaphanous chiffon, then in clingfilm undies and, most titillatingly, in a theatrical little number that is no more than a few beads strung together in strategic places.

Slender, lithe and frisky, she wastes no time in satisfying the appetites of each new lover before bumping them off, sometimes accidentally, but always without a qualm. (Lulu is the living definition of 'drop-dead gorgeous'.)

Friel perfectly captures the Lulu described by her portrait painter as "a nude with clothes on. I can't stop thinking about what's underneath..." But there's much more to Wedekind's Lulu than abandoned eroticism; this wanton waif has an uncorrupted and incorruptible essence, which is why she can use her body and be abused by others as shamelessly as she does and remain a free-spirit.

Moreover, she should have the power endlessly to transform herself as she becomes the embodiment of the desires of each new lover. (To her fat porker of a husband she is Popsy, the innocent child needing fatherly protection, to Alan Howard's worldly, cynical newspaper editor Schoning, she's Mignon, sweet and exciting.) These vital elements of this extraordinary femme fatale entirely elude Friel.

She changes her clothes, her hair and acquires a thin veneer of sophistication before slipping down into the gutter and becoming the cheap mini-skirted hooker, easy prey to Jack the Ripper, who finishes her off. But, whatever the costume, the thin, reedy, colourless voice betrays her as an ordinary, misguided, little tart.

Shut your eyes and Friel has the vocal projection and sultry sexuality..... <Webmaster's snip>

- Georgina Brown

(Webmaster: "Let's leave it there as I think I sense jealousy of sorts... !!")