Towards the end of the Nineteenth century, a new German dramatist distinguished himself for the significant quality of his plays: Frank Wedekind. He was born in Hanover in 1846 and died in Munich in 1918; ever since he was very young he showed a noticeable interest in circus life, cabaret shows and the theatre as a whole. He was the advertising manager for a Swiss firm, he later worked as a journalist and he subsequently devoted himself to devising and writing texts for the stage, which were censored on several occasions owing to the originality of their contents. Wedekind’s first play dates back to 1891 and is Spring’s Awakening, a scene play whose leading characters are teenagers who are just discovering sensual love, previously unknown to them; one of them, the most fragile, in a fit of desperation kills himself the first time he gives way to dejection. Another one, instead, who is cunning and wicked, corrupts a girl up to the point of inducing her to death. This play was followed by the dramatic diptych Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), which is often unified under the title Lulu, after the name of the protagonist of the two plays, and which many view as Wedekind’s masterpiece. Lulu is a young woman who intends to prevail on others by making use of her charm. Her ability to dominate the opposite sex and her use of voluptuousness as a means to move upwards on the social ladder are the distinctive features of the inner life of this woman, capable of driving to despair and suicide the various men who, almost inevitably, fall in love with her. Her first victim is Goll, medical counsellor, a respectable gentleman of some years. He marries her but, because of his jealously, he dies from an apoplectic stroke, when he thinks he has caught her in the act with the painter Schwarz, whom she is sitting for. Nothing affects Lulu: she marries the painter, who is also hopelessly in love with her, and starts leading a gracious bourgeois life; in the second act of Earth Spirit, the journalist Schon, one of Lulu’s numerous lovers, discloses to his friend the painter how he first met the girl, when she was just over twelve, in conditions of great misery, since she was a poor flower-girl who earned her miserable living opposite the Alhambra Café. Schon had subsequently educated her and had succeeded in getting her to marry the elderly Goll from whom, as Schon insinuates, the painter has inherited, by marrying Lulu, a considerable sum, which is why he is somehow to make the girl happy and more obedient to his will, before she leaves him for another man. Having learnt about the young woman’s rather murky past and the way Schon had encouraged Lulu’s ambitions, Schwarz drops into a painful state of prostration, he sees no further way out except suicide and therefore horrendously slits his throat with a razor blade. However Lulu stops at nothing and plays even more with her charm, which increasingly turns into a devilish instrument, accompanied by an unquenchable thirst for power and money. Nothing stops her: she wants ever more success, she goes in for dancing, directed by Schon’s son, Alwa, determined to destroy Schon’s engagement and imminent wedding with a honest young women, playing on the journalist’s long-standing morbid passion for her. Lulu obtains what she was after, since Schon eats out of her hand to the point that she manages to get him to get rid of his fiancée with a few lines. So Lulu marries Schon, and for the man the wedding marks the beginning of misery. Exasperated by Lulu’s disorderly and boundless lifestyle - even Countess Geschwitz appears to be ambiguously interested in Lulu - and in order to free himself from the chains which psychologically crush him, he thinks of leading her to shoot herself, especially when he realises that his own son is completely overcome by the bewitching charm of this exterminating woman. But in fact Lulu will level the gun against him and kill him, before the eyes of his son and of Countess Geschwitz. Earth Spirit closes with Schon’s death and with the police on the doorstep. Pandora’s Box resumes Lulu’s vicissitudes but, in a sense, the key character is Countess Geschwitz, who loves her without shame or bounds. Thanks to a stratagem devised and carried out by the Countess, who takes her place, Lulu is let out after a year and half, and starts flirting with Alwa. However, Lulu’s existence suddenly takes a turn for the worse: for some sort of talion law, this elegant femme fatale ends up in the Slums of London’s East End, selling herself for a few halfpence, without her knowing, to a homicidal lunatic like Jack the Ripper. At the epilogue, the Countess is also present, having always followed her, and she also follows her in death, in that the Ripper will repeatedly attack Geschwitz before attacking Lulu. In Pandora’s box we witness the devastating story of the penitence of this woman, who is the violent archetype of femininity. Almost as if driven by cathartic motivations, Wedekind himself wanted to play Jack’s role on the first night of the play in Vienna, in May 1905. In addition, we would like to mention Macabre Dance (1906), also known under the title of The Death of the Devil, which tells about the clash between a young moralist, who plays the role of the redeemer in a social environment of the lowest degree, and a man who makes an apologia in defence of those who live in such conditions. He manages to prove to the woman that the only joy human beings are entitled to is in fact the one she regards as turpitude. The young woman seems to believe this blindly to start with; however, when they both listen to the confession of other people who live in that environment, according to which the alleged happiness is only disappointment and despair, they actually realise the indescribable anguish of their lives. The text of Franziska (1911) is some sort of Faust in the feminine: the heroine goes through all possible experiences, including that of leading the life of a man and marrying a woman, she is a monster which destroys people’s lives and sows death with no pangs of conscience. On the other hand, Wedekind’s aim is to detect human instinctivity as opposed to the hypocritical conventionality shared by great part of the society of his days. He suggests a morality structured on natural impulses, without constraints or limits. (traduzione Interpres sas Giussano)