Lulu_BAM. November 2007.Photo: Richard Termine

Frank Wedekind’s Lulu is essentially a play about excess. It seems like an odd match for Michael Thalheimer, the German director known for his painfully minimalist style. Thalheimer’s productions, like his lauded Emilia Galotti which was seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music a few years ago, share a recognizably restrained aesthetic. His Lulu takes place in its entirety on a bare stage. The only piece of scenery is a rectangular white wall spanning most of the stage, which moves closer to the audience during each blackout, constricting the actors’ playing space; the only props are the murder weapons. Even the portrait of the heroine, the fetishistic reproduction that Wedekind has follow her around Europe, never appears on Thalheimer’s stage. Thalheimer’s concentration on the actors’ bodies, however, works well for a play which is so intensely corporeal.

Lulu is also a play about doors: opening, closing, hiding behind them, breaking them open. Thalheimer’s undefined space, in which both privacy and secrecy seem impossible, undermines the fetishistic aura of the play. Actors wander in and out unannounced – sometimes they seem to be entering by accident. The simulated sexual acts seem more ridiculous th

Lulu is also a play about doors: opening, closing, hiding behind them, breaking them open. Thalheimer’s undefined space, in which both privacy and secrecy seem impossible, undermines the fetishistic aura of the play. Actors wander in and out unannounced – sometimes they seem to be entering by accident. The simulated sexual acts seem more ridiculous than either sensual or scandalous. When one of Lulu’s partners lifts her onto his shoulders and props her back against the white wall to perform noisy oral sex on her, Lulu stares at the audience. The look of boredom in her face makes the grunting man beneath here seem like a fool. Indeed, this is a pattern repeated throughout the production, which seems more like a commentary on male than on female sexuality. Thalheimer’s male actors are very eager to disrobe – Lulu never does.

Lulu_BAM. November 2007.Photo: Richard Termine

According to the director, Fritzi Haberlandt, the actress portraying Lulu, was once told as an acting student that “she would be a fantastic actress, but the one part she would never play in her life would be that of Lulu” Interview with David Levine for BOMB Magazine). Indeed, Haberlandt is not playing Lulu the way audiences familiar with the play might expect her to. There is none of that old Lulu baggage here – that baggage created partly by Louise Brooks in Georg Pabst’s 1929 classic film version of the play. Haberlandt makes no attempt to portrary the essentialized “eternal feminine” that critics have seen in Wedekind’s play. In this production it is Lulu that is always changing, always adapting to her new situation. Haberlandt is toeing a fine line. Her Lulu seems trapped, but not victimized. This is not a simplistic feminist interpretation of a classic male fantasy. Haberlandt’s Lulu is not the insatiable sexual being that Wedekind might have had in mind, but she’s not a passive participant, either. She does not enjoy sex, but neither does she suffered through it. Indeed, she seems to be asking for it, but always finding it a disappointment.

It is the men, not the woman, who seem essentialized in this production, partly thanks to Barbara Drosihn’s sleek costumes. While Lulu changes into a different dress for each act (or at least the same dress in a different color), the men remain in the same costume. They seem to be the ones that are incapable of evolving, of making progress. Inevitably, Lulu grows tired of them. They also seem to have a shared propensity for hurriedly taking their clothes off if Lulu makes the slightest sexual suggestion, another bad habit that bored Lulu and amuses the audience. Finally, they seem to die in very much the same half-seated position, as if incapable of achieving tragic status through presenting a dignified corpse.

One of the ways that Wedekind transforms Lulu into a universalized symbol of female sexuality is making the men incapable of remembering her real name and making up their own names for her, suggesting that Lulu is not one but all women. Here, however, this is made to seem like a ridiculous weakness of the men, which Lulu encourages by transforming herself to fit the different roles they expect her to play. Haberlandt’s Lulu is above all an actress, capable of satisfying their different expectations. It is not the different names they make up for her, but the men themselves that are interchangeable.

The one reverential nod that Thalheimer makes to the convention of the fetishized Lulu comes at the end of the play. During Lulu’s brutal mutilation and murder – indeed, not as graphic as Wedekind’s script leads us to expect – the white wall which has been moving closer to the audience, increasing Lulu’s sense of entrapment, becomes a screen on which Lulu’s missing portrait is projected. Starting with an extreme close-up of her eyes, the portrait becomes fuller as the wall moves back upstage. This single instance of hagiography seems out of place in this production, even though Haberlandt looks more like Joan of Arc than Mary. Moreover, it distracts the audience from the intense violence of this final moment, which seems shorter and less agonizing in Thalheimer’s adaptation in the first place.

Lulu_BAM. November 2007.Photo: Richard Termine

Wedekind’s monumental play has been cut down to two uninterrupted hours. This has become Thalheimer’s typical modus operandi. Every time he directs a classic drama he chisels at what he considers excessive, distracting, and dated, until a crackling core of intensity is left. Most notoriously, his version of The Oresteia, in a translation by Peter Stein, lacks Aeschylus’ cathartic ending, leaving Orestes in the bloody mess he created for himself. While purists might find this an outrage, his directing and not his editing is the greatest challenge on Wedekind. Thalheimer doesn’t indulge the sensually thrilling aspects of the play, or the circus atmosphere that Wedekind created. The acting is subdued, the costumes are stylishly simple, the scenery is barely there. There are no overwhelming bursts of emotion, and no tantalizing displays of eroticism. In Thalheimer’s version, Lulu is a play not about excess, but scarcity.

© Electronic Communications from the International Brecht Society: ECIBS 36.1 (Winter 2008)