Tilly No-Body - the origins
In the early 1990s, I was cast as Frank Wedekind's Lulu in a new adaptation by Peter Quint with songs by Steve Nash, produced at the Chelsea Centre Theatre, London.
The role is elusive, almost mythical. And as part of my research, I came across the autobiography of Wedekind's wife, Tilly. The book was entitled Lulu: The Role of My Life, and I imagined that I would discover within its contents the ways in which playing Lulu had launched Tilly into a dramatically successful career. Being then in my early twenties, I hoped for the same...
The only problem was that the book was written in German. So, clutching my schoolgirl German dictionary, I began the lengthy process of translating it into English.
What I discovered (over the years of translating) was that Tilly had coined the title for her autobiography because, in fact, Frank had turned her into Lulu in the course of their turbulent marriage. Frank would take aspects of their married life, turn them into potent dramas, put them on the stage for public consumption, and expect Tilly to enact the female roles. The boundaries between fact and fiction became increasingly blurred.
Eventually, Tilly suffered a nervous breakdown, booked herself into a hotel in Munich, swallowed poison, and thus attempted suicide. The attempt failed, and three days later she was found by the chambermaid, who summoned her sister, and Tilly was taken to a sanatorium to recover. Her throat, oesophagus, and inner organs were severely burnt from the poison, and Tilly was a wreck.
During the months of her recuperation, the poison found its way out of her body through her skin. Daily emollient treatments caused her dry skin to flurry like snowflakes in the air. One day, the skin of her hands came off like a pair of gloves. On the glove-hands, the lines of her old life were etched, while the new skin on her actual hands was baby-soft. Like a snake sloughing its old self, Tilly was emerging as a new creature.
So captivating was this image of self-destruction and reincarnation, I knew I wanted to explore the material further. Not only was I quite in love with Tilly Wedekind by the time I finished translating her autobiography, but I was also deeply curious about the nature of our identity as actors. Who are we? What are we really doing? We take on these words and lives and clothes and walks of invented characters, but, when you peel back all the layers of the onion, who are we deep within?
At one point in her late teens, Tilly Wedekind (then Newes) lost her virginity to her boyfriend. So shocked was her brother that she should do such a thing out of wedlock, that he declared she was no longer worthy of the family name. So for a while Tilly changed 'Newes' to 'Nieman', which is very close to the German for 'nobody': Niemand. This fact too became a stimulus for my play.
Tilly No-Body: Catastrophes of Love is a 70-minute, one-woman show weaving together original text and songs with extracts from Tilly's autobiography, letters between herself and Frank, snippets and themes from his plays, and a few inventions along the way.
Set in a circus ring (as indeed Wedekind's first LULU play - Earth Spirit - begins like this), with a lute, two puppets, a circus ball and some puffs of magic, TIlly No-Body invites the audience into a world of love, loss, theatre and desire. Walking the tightrope of the absurd and the beautiful, the grotesque and sublime, the comic and the tragic - this is a paean to Frank and Tilly, and a waltz towards Weimar Germany.
The role is elusive, almost mythical. And as part of my research, I came across the autobiography of Wedekind's wife, Tilly. The book was entitled Lulu: The Role of My Life, and I imagined that I would discover within its contents the ways in which playing Lulu had launched Tilly into a dramatically successful career. Being then in my early twenties, I hoped for the same...
The only problem was that the book was written in German. So, clutching my schoolgirl German dictionary, I began the lengthy process of translating it into English.
What I discovered (over the years of translating) was that Tilly had coined the title for her autobiography because, in fact, Frank had turned her into Lulu in the course of their turbulent marriage. Frank would take aspects of their married life, turn them into potent dramas, put them on the stage for public consumption, and expect Tilly to enact the female roles. The boundaries between fact and fiction became increasingly blurred.
Eventually, Tilly suffered a nervous breakdown, booked herself into a hotel in Munich, swallowed poison, and thus attempted suicide. The attempt failed, and three days later she was found by the chambermaid, who summoned her sister, and Tilly was taken to a sanatorium to recover. Her throat, oesophagus, and inner organs were severely burnt from the poison, and Tilly was a wreck.
During the months of her recuperation, the poison found its way out of her body through her skin. Daily emollient treatments caused her dry skin to flurry like snowflakes in the air. One day, the skin of her hands came off like a pair of gloves. On the glove-hands, the lines of her old life were etched, while the new skin on her actual hands was baby-soft. Like a snake sloughing its old self, Tilly was emerging as a new creature.
So captivating was this image of self-destruction and reincarnation, I knew I wanted to explore the material further. Not only was I quite in love with Tilly Wedekind by the time I finished translating her autobiography, but I was also deeply curious about the nature of our identity as actors. Who are we? What are we really doing? We take on these words and lives and clothes and walks of invented characters, but, when you peel back all the layers of the onion, who are we deep within?
At one point in her late teens, Tilly Wedekind (then Newes) lost her virginity to her boyfriend. So shocked was her brother that she should do such a thing out of wedlock, that he declared she was no longer worthy of the family name. So for a while Tilly changed 'Newes' to 'Nieman', which is very close to the German for 'nobody': Niemand. This fact too became a stimulus for my play.
Tilly No-Body: Catastrophes of Love is a 70-minute, one-woman show weaving together original text and songs with extracts from Tilly's autobiography, letters between herself and Frank, snippets and themes from his plays, and a few inventions along the way.
Set in a circus ring (as indeed Wedekind's first LULU play - Earth Spirit - begins like this), with a lute, two puppets, a circus ball and some puffs of magic, TIlly No-Body invites the audience into a world of love, loss, theatre and desire. Walking the tightrope of the absurd and the beautiful, the grotesque and sublime, the comic and the tragic - this is a paean to Frank and Tilly, and a waltz towards Weimar Germany.