The character of Lulu might have seemed forever stuck in the trope of the heavy-lidded femme fatale—might have, that is, had it not been for the recent presentation, by the Jean Cocteau Repertory, of the whole of Frank Wedekind’s gigantic Lulu play. This was its first staging anywhere in English, in a new translation by Eric Bentley. The history of the work, like its nomenclature, is tangled.

Wedekind, born in Hannover, Germany, in 1864, went to school in Switzerland and based his first dramatic masterpiece, Spring’s Awakening (1891), on his adolescent experiences there. This astonishing play, at once satiric exaggeration and ecstatic celebration of the overheated passions of youth, included—boldly, cavalierly, casually included—sex, abortion, suicide, and homosexuality. It was, in Wedekind’s words, “generally regarded as unheard-of filth.” Max Reinhardt was daring enough to stage it in 1901, but the results did not please Wedekind, who felt that the producer had made “an angry, deadly earnest tragedy, a thesis play, a polemic in the service of sexual enlightenment—whatever the current slogans of the fussy, pedantic lower middle class may be”—out of what its author had intended as a comedy with “a sunny image of life in every scene.” A quirky customer, Wedekind, but he was in fact justified in insisting on the pervasive humor, verging on farcicality, that paradoxically suffuses Spring’s Awakening. One example: the play ends in a graveyard with a youth being solicited by the shade of his friend, a recent suicide, to join him