Frank Wedekind’s Lulu comprising the two plays Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, has not altogether lost the power to shock, even when it is given the rather genteel performances it receives at the Palace, where Leon Rubin has adapted and directed a new translation by Peter Tegel. It's author was one of the pioneers of steaming sexuality on stage, though at heart it is a moralistic story, showing the destructive quality of lust, with a lip-smacking Ringmaster, the forerunner of the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, setting the scene for the tale of Lulu, the beautiful young girl, a child of nature who at first hardly realises her hold over men but ultimately ends up in degradation in London and becomes a victim of a Jack the Ripper. Rubin gives it a mercifully uncluttered production, in a nicely atmospheric series of economical settings by Fran Thompson and decorated with a neat musical score by Alasdair MacNeill, its exotic quality heightened by the use of two black actors, Anni Domingo and Abraham Osuagwu, in the roles of Magelone and Lulu’s second husband Schwarz, and the diminutive David Rappaport as Schigolch, the Machiavellian hanger-on who eventually shares in Lulu’s downfall in the East End garrett.

Lucy Gutteridge, moving with a natural grace and joy of living, is more successful in the first part of the play, in which she casually dismisses the deaths of three husbands, one of whom she has shot herself, than in the second, when she gives the impression of a public schoolgirl fallen on hard times.  But it is still a performance of distinction, very much of a piece, a combination of innocence and cruelty with the air of a fallen angel. And she does have the support of an exceptionally gifted cast—John Woodvine as the rigid and repressed Schon, who has been captivated by Lulu since childhood, and later as the evil Casti-Piani; Heather Canning as the lesbian Countess; David Peart as the Ringmaster; the American actor Jeffrey Guyton as the athletic circus artist; Peter Hutchinson as Schon’s bewitched son; and Wolfe Morris and Gwenda Hughes also in this bizarre parade of characters.