The New York Times "Lulu" Review - 7 July 2001

Men were her victims - or so she thought

The lobbyists for gun control and nuclear disarmament have yet to register complaints about Anna Friel's legs, which are currently gracing the stage of the Eisenhower Theater of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

But there is little question that as the heroine of Frank Wedekind's ''Lulu,'' in the vivacious visiting production from the Almeida Theater of London, Ms. Friel is standing on a pair of extremely lethal weapons. This young British actress, known to Broadway audiences as the self-destructive vixen of ''Closer,'' is a small woman.

Yet framed by clothes hemmed at or slit to the northernmost regions of her thighs, her legs seem to stretch from here to eternity, stealing the attention from the busy, arty scenery that surrounds her. They bring to mind a time when mere glimpses of stocking were shocking, and a woman's exposed lower limbs were perceived as stairways to heaven or hell.

This dishing up of cheesecake is not gratuitous. Wedekind's fabled study of sexual hypocrisy at the turn of the century features characters who wonder if Lulu's legs don't get jealous of each other and who prostrate themselves at her bare feet, their eyes climbing hopefully upward.

In this tasty but uneven production, directed by Jonathan Kent, those eyes rarely make it to Ms. Friel's China-doll face. Nor does this Lulu, a hard-core pragmatist whose flexible legs bend themselves into a remarkably varied code of invitations, seem to want it otherwise. She knows where the center of power is.

The satiric and comic implications of men going mad over the promises of Lulu's legs are mined with gleeful energy in this streamlined version of Wedekind's masterwork, which has been adapted by the English playwright Nicholas Wright from a translation by Wes Williams. The show, part of the Kennedy Center's festival of arts from the United Kingdom, runs through July 15.

Wedekind's Lulu is most widely known today for her inspired translation into opera (Alban Berg's ''Lulu'') and silent film (G. W. Pabst's ''Pandora's Box''). Audience members familiar with those works may be startled by the breeziness of the Almeida's take on the same material.

Mr. Kent -- familiar to Broadway audiences for his stylish presentations of Diana Rigg in ''Medea'' and Ralph Fiennes in ''Hamlet'' -- has thinned out the aura of erotic mystery immortally conjured by Berg and Pabst. He instead shapes the production as distanced, exaggerated satire, a forerunner to Brecht's theater of alienation.

Corruption and vice are worn as flashily as Halloween masks; lines often feel framed in quotation marks and the pace is faster than a speeding bullet. There is even a Kurt Weill-like streetwalker song, sung by Lulu behind panels of paint-streaked glass, to bridge the scenes. And the look of the production, designed by Rob Howell, is an eye-poppingly lurid buffet of Expressionist and Secessionist images, with visual references to everyone from Klimt to Kokoschka.

For the evening's first half -- during which the irresistible Lulu, a former child prostitute, sees three successive husbands fall dead more or less at her feet -- this is all quite enjoyable as a sort of macabre boudoir farce about the ultimate material girl. The early scenes move so breathlessly that you don't worry too much about discrepancies or where you're being taken.

The redoubtable Alan Howard is entertainingly on hand as Dr. Schoning, Lulu's cynical Pygmalion (and later, her husband). Mr. Howard's remote, dyspeptic cynicism, accentuated by his sinister smoked spectacles, is in contrast to the relative innocence of Lulu's other victims.

These include her elderly, porcine first husband (Roger Swaine); the intense, unworldly young painter who is husband No. 2 (James Hillier); and Schoning's firebrand of a son (Oliver Milburn), who becomes the third Mr. Lulu. There is also the lesbian countess (Johanna ter Steege), who would (and does) die for love of Lulu, and Lulu's dirty sponge of a father (well played by Tom Georgeson), who makes Alfred P. Doolittle look like Ward Cleaver.

After the intermission, the vivid balance that Mr. Kent has maintained among these animated gargoyles starts to slip, as does his control of the evening's tone. The production has given fair warning that darkness lies ahead, by having Jack the Ripper (Peter Sullivan), Lulu's nemesis, hovering as a spectral observer in each scene. Jonathan Dove's music, performed by a live quartet, is woven with ominousness throughout.

But the big party scene in Paris that begins the show's second half feels unmoored, faux-decadent in the way modern-dress stagings of ''La Traviata'' tend to be. This version gives undue prominence to an aristocratic little girl, the daughter of a guest, who is drooled over by rich lechers and who witnesses Lulu's increasing desperation.

Presumably this is meant to confirm a theory suggested by Mr. Wright, who wrote the psychodrama ''Mrs. Klein,'' that Lulu was warped by early sexual abuse. But the image of the frozen, watching child is here as welcome and as natural as a Sunday sermon. It also seems facile to turn the final scene, in which Lulu is reduced to selling her flesh on the streets of London, into a contemporary vision of urban blight.

Ms. Friel, it must be admitted, brings an affecting mortal chill to the last chapter of Lulu's life, just as she brought a delectable air of self-adoration to the earlier scenes. She doesn't have anything like the untarnishable amorality of Louise Brooks, whom Pauline Kael compared to a ''beautiful, innocently deadly cat,'' in Pabst's movie.

This Lulu is more obviously a product of social forces, a sort of Lorelei Lee according to Karl Marx, and you can occasionally catch a gold digger's shrewdness on Ms. Friel's face. This demystifies and even cheapens Lulu, while making the men who fall for her seem even more foolish. But it's worth remembering that she is, after all, one man's dark fantasy of the feminine mystique.

Ms. Friel's Lulu may be too pedestrian to stick to the memory the way that Brooks's does, but it seems something like feminist justice to present this character without the poetic veils. Toward the play's end, Lulu overhears two men talking about how they don't understand women. ''I understand them,'' Lulu says. In the frayed bitterness in Ms. Friel's voice, you hear endless generations of weary, worn-out sex symbols.

LULU By Frank Wedekind; adapted by Nicholas Wright, from a translation by Wes Williams.
Directed by Jonathan Kent; sets by Rob Howell; lighting by Mark Henderson; music by Jonathan Dove; sound by John A. Leonard; fight direction by Terry King. The Almeida Theater Company and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts production. Presented by the Kennedy Center Celebrates the Arts of the United Kingdom. At the Eisenhower Theater, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, James A. Johnson, chairman; Michael M. Kaiser, president.

WITH: Anna Friel (Lulu), Alan Howard (Dr. Schoning), James Hillier (Eduard Schwarz), Johanna ter Steege (Martha), Roger Swaine (Dr. Goll and Mr. Hopkins), Oliver Milburn (Alwa Schoning), Tom Georgeson (Schigolch), Peter Sullivan (Jack) and Anna Maguire or Francesca Murray-Fuentes (Kadega).

Ben Brantley