Dorothy Chansky reports on the theatrical offerings of the Kennedy Center's festival "The Arts of the United Kingdom".

The Kennedy Center festival of The Arts of the United Kingdom, abbreviated in logo form as UK-KC, concludes this week with Lulu (through July 15). Festival theatre offerings have featured several takes on storytelling and character, tapping source material from commedia dell'arte to a 19^th-century realist novel and the early years of the European avant garde. The three large productions (I missed the one-woman Spoonface Steinberg, which dealt with an autistic child) all inhabited worlds wherein love looms large. In Lulu love's a commodity and obsession; in The Mill on the Floss it's warped by repression or propriety; in a Servant to Two Masters, it moved beyond the play proper as the audience literally tossed signs of adoration for the protean hero over the footlights.

Lulu, best known as an opera by Alban Berg or in one of several silent film versions, was penned in sprawling play form by Frank Wedekind between 1892 and 1894. This production is newly minted by London's Almeida Theatre Company under the direction of Jonathan Kent. The vamp heroine is variously interpretable as lethal seductress, exploited victim, healthily sexed woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, or product of childhood abuse.

We meet Lulu in an artist's studio where she is posing for her portrait in the presence of her husband as well as her former lover. The husband, a sixty-something, porcine doctor (Roger Swaine), who never lets Lulu out of his sight, drops dead as the end of the scene. A young painter (James Hillier), an idealist who becomes Lulu's second husband, slits his throat at the end of the second scene when he learns that she has a past. Husband number three, Dr Schoning, is the ex-lover from the opening scene, with whom Lulu has been carrying on for years. Alan Howard plays him in dark glasses, looking like a burned-out, dyspeptically middle-aged cross between John Lennon and Jack Nicholson. Schoning is a newspaper editor who is blackmailed into the marriage after witnessing the artist's suicide; he supports Lulu in splendour but he is reduced, through her indifference to him, to shooting heroin and spying on her escapades with the butler and with an acrobat. Scene three waxes farcical as lovers pop in and out, one of them diving behind curtains and under the bed. Lulu aims a pistol at a visiting lover but shoots her husband instead, and the act ends with her inheriting the editor's fortune, marrying his playwright son (Oliver Milburn) and fleeing to Paris.

Act II opens at an over-the-top party of gambling and drinking, hosted by Lulu in her new digs. But an investigator has found her out and threatens to turn her in for murder if she doesn't pay him a huge sum of money. A sudden market collapse renders all the gamblers, including Lulu's husband, broke. (Wedekind tossed in a government overthrow to force an ending to scene three- no one can accuse this playwright of eschewing the multiple deus ex machina). In the final scene, Lulu is reduced to streetwalking, living in squalor with the (unsuccessful) playwright husband she ceased loving long ago and the alcoholic father who first put her on the street well before her adolescence. She is also pursued by a lesbian countess (Johanna ter Steege), the one admirer who never gets to sleep with her and the one who is faithful to the end. Only the countess still finds the original more beautiful then the portrait that has remained in view for much of the performance, a portrait which fascinates the father and last husband long after Lulu herself has become repulsive to them.

These five scenes were broken into two plays at one point in Wedekind's myriad rewrites, but in Nicholas Wright's adaptation (from a translation by Wes Williams) they fit a tidy dramaturgy of exposition-rising action-crisis-climax-denouement. What is far less clear than the dramatic structure is what we are to make of this particular Lulu, played by Anna Friel. By now, Ben Brantley's New York Times assessment of Friel's legs as "lethal weapons" has probably become legend. All of Rob Howell's costumes cling to Friel's tiny body, and many of the dresses feature metallic fabric or beading that moves like fringe. Two outfits are transparent. Yet Friel's performance radiates flirt-and-party girl far more than ruthless schemer or calculating victimizer. The actress is at her most masterful when the character's security, both financial and legal, falls apart; we watch her machinations as she tries to buy off three predators by playing them against each other. Friel's edgy, intelligent drive at this point struck me as far more engaging and less generic than her earlier teasing, show-off stuff. This shift may be part of a strategy to work with the idea that the glamorous Lulu is a projection of others' fantasies, with very little "there" there. The kept woman/child wife of Act I says outright "I don’t know who I am". She spends most of her first marriage in dancing clothes which she can't even choose or put on by herself. She recognizes that she was taught depravity, but what else has she learned ? Even as hostess of her Parisian salon, she says "I've only got my body. That's all I am."

If Friel / Lulu is lethal, this production suggests that it's because lovers are naïfs, egomaniacs, profiteers or creepily obsessive, not because the object of their fantasies is out for much more than fun, consumerism, and security, and certainly not because she has a predatory agenda. They see (or pay to construct) what they want, and I think it's no accident that this Lulu is largely television sunny and skinny rather than opera-sultry and sensuous. It's easier to project onto a relatively blank screen. Even when she turns her last trick, there's a girlish sincerity to Friel's proposition, sordid surroundings and all. The man seated next to me, a seventyish radiologist with whom I conversed briefly before the lights went down, leaned over twice during Lulu's glamorous phase to tell me "you could be her twin". Dark hair and a size six are the extent of the possible resemblance, but my point is that no one would attempt a pickup (or even a compliment) by comparison with a predator. At most, this Lulu is a Sally Bowels loving the limelight, the clothes, the champagne, and watching others jump when she gives the command.