Lulu

Lulu is about one woman and a lot of men. It’s also about freedom, sex, power, guilt, fear, shame, and taboos. How much different is our society today from the society of the Wilhelmine Period around 1900 – the society in which Frank Wedekind wrote this drama, which broke all taboos and was therefore censored and in some cases banned completely?

The character Lulu is a type of exaggeration who incorporates several facets of how women are viewed and how femininity, the child-woman, prostitutes, and women as objects and subjects are presented. With every act of this drama, and with every man she desires, or who desires her, Lulu takes on a different role in this regard. Sometimes she acts like a naive child who appears to reveal herself unintentionally, while at other times she is the prostitute who sells her body in a very calculated manner. Wedekind paints a bleak and hopeless picture of how men react to Lulu’s brand of anarchy, and he also depicts the consequences of her vitality in the same manner.

RambaZamba’s production of Lulu uses Wedekind’s drama as an experimental theatrical arrangement that seeks to explore the archaic aspects of our view of femininity, and the way we view gender roles. Through this production, we learn about the constant quest for freedom and happiness in a social order that defines everything in “black and white” on the basis of conservative thinking – a way of thinking that has produced the axis of “body-soul-sexuality-morality” that we still need to free ourselves from today.

„Schemms Spielweise ist von graziöser Ruhe. Sie will ihren eigenen Rhythmus und Ausdruck behaupten, ihre Sätze sind wie aufsteigende Seifenblasen, die mit einem leisen Plopp zerfallen und einen Moment der Stille hinterlassen, in dem das Gesagte nachhallt.“ Jakob Hayner, Neues Deutschland