HEADLONG

This is more than an adaptation by Anna Ledwich of Wedekind's play. It's a reimagination: like a nightmare, very like the one you had before, but also frighteningly different. Helen Goddard's set is both mysterious and recognisable, open and labyrinthine. It signals that we are in the underworld of the soul. Lulu (Sinead Matthews) is her own prisoner, a predator and a victim, innocent and cunning, on heat but cold inside. Matthews gives a brilliant performance, thrilling, shocking and moving. Her Lulu is a grown-up Lolita, with a menacingly agile body, eyes that suggest aggression and fear, and a voice that swings from sweet and seductive to coarse and shrill. Ledwich directs with an impeccable sense of darkness, clarity and the tragedies that people bring on themselves.

Anna Ledwich’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s seminal late 19th-century German drama is part of New Directions, a joint initiative between the Gate and Headlong Theatre in which emerging directors are invited to put a fresh authorial stamp on a classic text. Ledwich also directed it, steering a fine cast through her almost fiendishly incisive script with a gratifyingly sure hand.

What a timelessly ripe and ambiguous morality tale Wedekind concocted, and one that remains scarily relevant when so many girls and women are being abused or killed on a daily basis globally. Groomed as a plaything of men from childhood, Lulu slips between obsessive husbands and predatory lovers (and one lovelorn female admirer) with all the loyalty of a cat. A heart attack, a suicide and murder spur her on. But is she a shameless temptress or the victim of their desires? Although physically nothing like the iconic Lulu of Louise Brooks from the 1929 film Pandora’s Box, Sinead Matthews is nevertheless sensationally apt casting with her small stature, peaches and cream skin, blonde hair and a voice that frequently breaks into husky giggles. An infantilised femme fatale with a mercurial temperament, this Lulu has the moral sense of a resilient animal.

But Ledwich is, rightly, far more damning about the emotionally corrupt men swarming round her. The balance Matthews maintains between the virgin/whore roles imposed on her is fascinating to witness, mainly because she and Ledwich allow us to see the confused and vulnerable child-woman beneath the fantasy construct. Lulu is such a multifaceted character that the clarity they bring to her story can be thrilling, especially in the confines of a venue the size of a shoebox.

Credit can be shared with the designer Helen Goddard, whose set of rough wood, curtains and stretched canvas is peeled back in layers as the play progresses. The atmosphere of squalid intimacy this production conjures is just right. The finale is a repulsive act of violence that sinks into the pit of your stomach.

More than a century after Frank Wedekind let her out of his theatrical box, Lulu remains as alluring and elusive as ever, dancing merrily through our fantasies, wreaking havoc like a female Pan, always just beyond our grasp. She is brought into sharper focus than usual in this intelligent, compressed version of Wederkind's original two plays, written and directed by Anna Ledwich, whose talents stretched (on the night I saw) it to playing the love-lorn lesbian Countess Geschwitz for an indisposed colleague.

Like Lulu herself, Wedekind's plays have a troubled history, victims of the playwright's structural inconsistencies and tonal messiness, censorship, outrage and misunderstanding. Not everything is clarified here, but Ledwich's production is compelling, even if it makes for an uncomfortable evening of comi-tragedy that casts the audience as voyeurs in a spiralling masturbatory nightmare.

There is not a lot to like, but there is a great deal to admire, not least in Helen Goddard's design, which conjures the peep show and perhaps the abattoir, too, as befits the play's shocking ending. Having encouraged us to feast our eyes on Lulu, Ledwich then spares us nothing in the bloody, shuddering denouement.

Of course, it's all an illusion, like Lulu herself, who is all things to all men, who call her by whichever name turns them on: Lolly, Eve, Mignon. There could even be a Marilyn in there, such is the timelessness of Ledwich's approach, which begins with a naughty rendition of I Want to Be Loved By You as Lulu jerks like a doll to entertain the elderly roué Dr Goll.

This is also a play about self-delusion. Despite all he has witnessed, the artist Schwartz convinces himself that Lulu is a virgin; Goll's heart attack is brought on by the mistaken belief that he had been cuckolded; the paedophile Schoning is doomed by the certainty that he can have his cake and eat it.

Only the Countess sees Lulu for what she really is, and in Sinead Matthews's performance this Lulu is a wonder: so greedy for life, trailing such throaty laughter that she dazzles like a mirage. There is terrific support, too, from Sean Campion, Michael Colgan, Paul Copley and Jack Gordon. It's a flawed play and a largely unpleasant experience, but that's probably as it should be, because by watching we become complicit in this dance of death.