The Sunday Times "Lulu" Review - 25 March 2001

Impotent Offering

The National Theatre of Islington, better known as the Almeida, has moved to another new venue while its HQ is refurbished. This is another terrifically audience- and actor-friendly space: a former coach station just off King's Cross, seating 520. I grieve to report, however, that the much- awaited brilliant production of Frank Wedekind's Lulu has been unaccountably left behind and replaced by a grim fairy tale under the same title.

It is the old, old story: the puzzlement, sometimes amounting to incomprehension, in the British theatre in the face of German expressionist drama. For a start, Wedekind opened the play with a prologue by an Animal Trainer, whip and revolver in hand, introducing a play about beasts of prey. Nicholas Wright's new version omits him, to be replaced, in Jonathan Kent's production, by a silent, overcoated figure stalking about downstage past a screen of murky glass panels that function as the curtain. A female voice sings, accompanied by a small band sounding like Kurt Weill, but more the Weill of September Song than Mack The Knife. You begin to feat that the keynote of the evening is going to be a curious erotic nostalgia rather than controlled hostility.

Lulu is a play about sexual infatuation, which some of the characters mistake for love. Lulu herself is both a real person and an idea of womanhood that, like so many other ideas, is tailored by men to their own needs. This is why her various lovers and husbands give her different names: it is their way of asserting ownership. When Wedekind described the play as "a monster tragedy", he meant that there was something lethal, fatally destructive, monstrous, about a femininity that could beguile you, excite you, make you obsessed and then cast you off and destroy you. It is as if Galatea were to turn round and murder Pygmalion.

For this to have a convincing impact, you need several convincing Pygmalions. The chief one in Lulu is Schön, the powerful newspaper editor (here for some reason called Schoning): a man who picked up Lulu when she was a thieving child, educated her, gave her class and taught her to satisfy his overwhelmingly strong personal sexual needs (rather as Wedekind's own had been). Alan Howard plays him as stately and lugubrious, but puttylike. There is next to no sense that this a man of great power, only that he wears an expensive coat. His relationship with his son, Alwa (Oliver Milburn) another of Lulu's lover-victims, slight though it admittedly is in Wedekind, goes for nothing. When Schoning is murdered, you do not get the feeling that someone of great consequence has been casually, squalidly destroyed, but only that a middle-aged infatuated skirt-chaser has got his comeuppance from his popsy.

Wedekind is not exactly a social realist, but it is a great mistake to think of him as a writer of purely expressionist-symbolist fantasies. Like his younger contemporaries Kaiser and Sternheim, he never completely takes off from the sordid, grotesque but precise realities of life. In his plays, as in the canvasses of Dix, Grosz or Bekmann, exaggeration and satire function to highlight reality; what is missing is the sense of a recognisable society where the rules of status and habit make any deviation dangerous. For precisely the same reason, you do not get the sense of the deviation and obsession that is at the black heart of the play. All the characters, except Dr Goll, Lulu's elderly, besotted first husband (Roger Swaine), look and sound as though they might at any moment get up and trundle off home for a cup of warm cocoa.

Lulu is a big two-part play, which Wright has turned into a single-evening version. I will not bore you with the play's publishing history, Wedekind's rewrites, his trial for obscenity and what Wright has changed or left out. Something has clearly had to go - though I do miss Hugenberg, the infatuated schoolboy who gets one of Wedekind's best curtain lines. What I do miss is the tone. Wedekind wrote from a dark, tortured need, and he wrote to shock and outrage. He had a whiplash imagination and a tone to match. I find Wright's version almost conversational by comparison: he does not make your flesh creep, or your sense of sexuality recoil and go all troubled. Expressionist venom is replaced by a kind of late-Romantic anxiety.

Anna Friel's Lulu fits this text perfectly, and that is the trouble. She is a waif, but an English waif, which compares with the German variety roughly as a custard pie does with a hand grenade. Friel has a remarkable stage presence for someone playing only her second professional theatre role; but she seems to charm her victims rather than ensnare them. The little wilful gestures seem playful and kittenish. If they work at all, it is only because her victims are not up to much.

There is a great, overarching symbolism of death wish in the play: the sex drive hauling you helplessly towards death, but partly with your subconscious complicity. It is a prophetic symbolism: when Wedekind wrote the play, Freud had barely started on his psychological researches. Lulu is a very real woman, but she is also the embodiment of this symbolism, sleepwalking to destruction. She seems turned on by danger. When, at the end, she asks Jack the Ripper to spend the night, it is not because she wants company, but because danger, for her, is both a stimulant and a perverse calmative. In those last minutes, it felt, for a few moments, as if Friel was about to burst out of the production and become Wedekind's dark angel. Alas, it did not last.