Lulu

Nicholas Wright's version of Wedekind's celebrated erotic masterpiece is the first to be based on the author's original text, restoring the clarity, the daring and the sexual explicitness of a modern masterpiece written a hundred years before its time. Lulu is the story of the decline and fall of a young woman possessed of a fatal combination of sexuality and innocence. She passes from German and Parisian high society to the streets of Jack the Ripper's London – destroying, and ultimately destroyed by, her lovers. Wedekind originally wrote his extraordinary 'monster tragedy' a full twenty years before the First World War. Finding no-one prepared to stage it on account of its sexual candour, he toned it down and rewrote it as two full-length dramas, which is how The Lulu Plays were published and produced throughout most of the twentieth century. Nicholas Wright's version, based on Wedekind's original text, reveals the author's original conception for the play. It was premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2001.