ted witzel and tearing off Lulu's corsets. And ours
01 May 2018

"I find it surprisingly tender," says ted witzel of Lulu v7: Aspects of a Femme Fatale. "One of the great pleasures of Frank Wedekind's play is that it's fucking funny. It's hilarious and that's what leaves you with such an icky feeling at the end when Jack the Ripper kills her, and that's not a spoiler, that happens before the intermission. You're laughing through so much of that play, it's funny, it's sumptuous, everything you like about a James Bond film. It's champagne and oysters everywhere, guns and fabulous dresses.  In each scene one of Lulu's husband dies, they're all super high stakes and everyone's very emotional and wound up. It's very exciting theatre. Especially because we've taken a four and a half hour play and squished it into about an hour, it moves fucking fast."

Wedekind's Lulu is controversial and enduring - it was first staged in 1904 - and has been condemned as a morality play and praised as an precursor to modern feminism. The promotional tagline for Lulu v7 begins "A young femme fatale fucks her way across Europe . . ." offering a clue to witzel's interpretation. "Wedekind, for better or for worse, really did love women and respect women," says witzel, "and he thought this was about female liberation but at the same time his feminism wasn't about the right to vote or pay equity, it was about women not being ashamed about having as much sex with him as he wanted them to. His feminism is compromised and problematic. But then whose isn't?"

witzel is no stranger to work that is compromised and problematic, he and his company The Red Light District has produced intense explorations of other classic texts from La Ronde to The Marquise of O and All's Well That Ends Well, as well as consulting on Mr Truth. "We've gone quite far from the original," says witzel. "The show is in two parts and by the end of the first part we've actually done Lulu. The second part is sort of a queer and feminist encounter with the script and it's staged through a much less narrative, much more bodycentric, much more physical, visceral way. Encountering the script in this story and trying to digest the questions and ideas inside of it in such a way that we can actually metabolize this material in terms of how much things have changed. And how much they haven't. In many ways we're still Victorians right now, right here. We just don't wear corsets as much."

And we are more discerning about our theatre and our analysis of it. "The second half is a bit of a ritual of collectivity that we're all gathered in this room to experience," says witzel. "A way of trying to digest a play. Like the first hour of conversation you would have to have at a bar after Lulu. So that the next step of the conversation is the really exciting one. We're trying to explode a conversation around Lulu through imagery and movement and poetry."

Lulu v7 has been through six versions and finally the full vision is about to be unleashed. "It's a large cast, it's a hugely technical show, it's an enormous design," says witzel. "Buddies looks very full right now. We put a lot of shit in that room. And when it all comes together I think it will be quite beautiful. I go to the theatre because I want visuals as much as I want stories and life. All three of those things are critical to me and I feel that one of the biggest sacrifices we make in Canada, and it's often budgetary, partly budgetary and connected to that is the amount of time we get to create. It just takes an immense of work to be really ambitious about the kind of visual world you're creating. Lulu is about pleasure and there has to be a real visual pleasure about it."

The large cast is extraordinary, including Valerie Buhagiar (Botticelli in the Fire and Sunday in Sodom), Richard Lam (Hello Again, Peter Pan, Heart of Steel), Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah (Bang Bang, Prince Hamlet, Contempt), Rose Tuong (All's Well That Ends Well), and Sky Gilbert returning to Buddies' main stage as an actor instead of directing. "It took me about six months to pull the cast together," says witzel, "because I was so specific about the kind of actors I needed and the kind of collaborators I wanted to have on this. Asking them to enter into a really unconventional process and take a lot of risks onstage and bring their personal politics to some pretty challenging material. I was very picky about the people I brought into this room. It's been a hard process because the show is so fucking big but it's also been an immense pleasure because I have so many amazing people in the room with me."

witzel is excited about unveiling the femme fatale that has been worked through six incarnations (in one of which witzel himself played Lulu), involved over 100 collaborators and consumed five years of work. How does witzel feel about this climatic moment? "It's a little bit insane to be honest. I don't know if I'm ready to let go of this thing but it's happening. I am ready for this rehearsal process to be done, it's a lot of work. It's bittersweet." And is it finished? Will there be a Lulu v8? "For fuck's sake I don't know," says witzel. "We joke about version 72..."