LULU - PRESS REVIEWS
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Kate Bassett
Anna Ledwich “one to watch”
“Flickering between callous materialism, panic and seemingly genuine love, the Lulu is made to seem mercurially complex.”
“Sinead Matthews’s pint-size Lulu is interesting casting, disturbingly like a little girl imitating MTV tarts, or Marilyn Monroe”
“Helen Goddard’s makeshift set – all rough planks, scaffolding and plastic sheeting – is oddly beautiful, softly side-lit by Emma Chapman.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/through-a-glass-darkly-almeida-londonbrlulu-gate-londonbrwomen-power-and-politics-tricycle-london-2005190.html
THE SUNDAY TIMES 4 Stars - John Peter
CRITIC'S CHOICE
“Wedekind’s famous play, so scandalous in its time, gets a powerful adaptation and shocking and moving production from Anna Ledwich. Sinead Matthews plays Lulu like an angel from hell. Do not miss.”
“Matthews gives a brilliant performance, thrilling, shocking and moving.”
“Ledwich directs with an impeccable sense of darkness, clarity and the tragedies that people bring on themselves.”
“Lulu (Sinead Matthews) is her own prisoner, a predator and a victim, innocent and cunning, on heat but cold inside.”
“This is more than an adaptation...it’s a reimagination. Ledwich directs with an impeccable sense of darkness [and] Matthews gives a brilliant performance, thrilling, shocking and moving.”
THE GUARDIAN 4 Stars - Lyn Gardner
“Lulu remains an alluring and elusive as ever, dancing merrily throughout fantasies, wreaking havoc like a female Pan, always just beyond our grasp.”
“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 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.”
“in Sinead Matthew’s performance this Lulu is a wonder: so greedy for life, trailing such throaty laughter that she dazzles like a mirage.”
“Ledwich's production is compelling…[Lulu] is brought into sharper focus than usual in this intelligent, compressed version of Wederkind's original two plays”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/jun/21/lulu-the-gate-theatre-review
THE TIMES 4 Stars - Donald Hutera
On Anna Ledwich’s adaptation & direction “steering a fine cast through her almost fiendishly, incisive script with a gratifyingly sure hand.”
“Sinead Matthews is…sensationally apt casting”
“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.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/stage/theatre/article2572545.ece
THE ARTS DESK James Woodall
“The characters dash around each other - mainly four men around the voracious Lulu - seeking sexual release (and never getting it) and, it's cleverly suggested, release from the tiny confines of the cupboard-like space before us.”
“Ledwich has understood it's about innocence, obsession, the vanishing of pleasure, the absolute elusiveness of erotic fixity - and death”
“production brilliantly avoids faux Expressionism (Wedekind was certainly a precursor of it), serving up instead a rollercoaster of a play which somehow stays real.”
“Much credit has to go to Sinead Matthews as Lulu.”
“She's not sensual, but endearingly watchable and a wonderful deliverer of the character's many put-downs”
“Sean Campion and Paul Copley put on commanding turns as the threatening, possessive older men in Lulu's shapeless life”
“But Ledwich must, too, be lauded out loud for her controlled, crisp direction in challenging circumstances: a sprawling text and a truly miniature theatre.”
“Honours lie with Matthews, who interprets this baffling role with such gusto and versatility.”
http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1669:lulu-theatre-review&Itemid=27
THEATREGUIDE LONDON Gerald Berkowitz
“Anna Ledwich's adaptation of Wedekind's two Lulu plays intelligently condenses and focuses the action, though an updating to the present adds little and may detract from the sense of the sexually repressed society in which the original is set.”
“The almost innocent - because unpremeditated - egocentricity of the character is both believable and scary, and it is to the actress's credit that she shows us Lulu's menace while retaining an odd sort of purity.”
http://www.theatreguidelondon.co.uk/reviews/lulu10.htm
THE STAGE Jason Best
Anna’s adaptation “…its repetitions and oddities produce gripping moments and piercing insights.”
“Lulu’s lovers all give her their own private name - Lulu, Lolly, Mignon, Eve, Katya. It’s an attempt to pin her down, possess her. But she remains beyond their grasp and unknowable - even to herself.”
”the cramped Gate stage enhances the sense of entrapment as Lulu’s serial flights lead her ever closer to her final doom.”
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/28626/lulu
POSTCARDS FROM THE GODS Andrew Haydon
“Sinead Matthews’s performance is unsettlingly compelling”
“What’s unsure is whether the sexuality is knowing or whether she is completely oblivious to her effect on men. This is a tension which is played on repeatedly. Does Lulu know what she wants? Does she ever really fall in love? Does she enjoy sex or tolerate it? Are these men using her or is she using them?”
“By the end, the sense of the stage deepening, particularly the removal of the “final curtain” (deliberate My Way gag?), has created a real feeling of movement, of the stage evolving to fit and accommodate the play or the narrative.”
“The music is also brilliantly mixed into the overall soundscape of the piece – with clattering guitars fading in and out of the sound of cities at night.”
“Helen Goddard’s visual design is at once cleverly specific and bluntly non-committal.”
“This is a clever, intelligent staging, with interesting decisions from the supporting cast and a remarkable central performance from Sinead Matthews”
“It’s also an excellent calling card for the director. Here’s hoping that even away from the New Directions rubric this is the sort of production we can expect more of from Ledwich, Goddard, Downing and Silverman in the future.”
http://postcardsgods.blogspot.com/2010/06/lulu-gate.html
LONDONIST Franco Milazzo
“If you ever need a reminder of the power of theatre, this is it.”
“Within the confines of the tiny Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, this work by Headlong (the theatre group behind Enron), packs a powerful punch”
http://londonist.com/2010/06/theatre_review_lulu_gate_theatre.php
REVIEWSGATE Timothy Ramsden
“a devastatingly alluring new version.”
“Helen Goddard’s set gradually opens up, revealing the suggestions of bondage around a masterfully male chair, just as the secret compartments of Lulu’s life are increasingly revealed.”
http://www.reviewsgate.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5162
OTHER REVIEWS
WHATSONSTAGE.COM 2 Stars - Theo Bosanquet
http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/
E8831276778563/Lulu.html
THE EVENING STANDARD 2 Stars - Fiona Mountford
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review-23846002-degraded-life-and-times-of-an-object-of-desire-in-lulu.do
THE BRITISH THEATRE GUIDE Philip Fisher
http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/lulugate-rev.htm