Wedekind, Frank

Wedekind, Frank [ Benjamin Franklin] (1864–1918), German dramatist and actor, who first appeared in cabaret, singing his own songs, and later acted in his own plays with his young wife. The first of these was Die junge Welt (written in 1889, prod. 1908); the best known is Frühlings Erwachen, written in 1891, which harks back to Büchner in its staccato structure and intensified realism, but looks forward to Expressionism and Symbolism in its grave-yard and schoolroom scenes in which it analyses the situation of two 14-year-old lovers who pay with their lives for the moral dishonesty of their tyrannical parents. It was produced by Reinhardt at the Berlin Kammerspiele in 1906, but its frank depiction of the results of sexual repression prevented its public performance in England until 1963, when as Spring Awakening it was seen at the Royal Court Theatre. In 1974 a new translation by Edward Bond, produced by the National Theatre (NY, 1978), proved that though dated the play still retained its hold. Two of Wedekind's later plays, Erdgeist (written in 1893, staged in 1902) and Die Büchse der Pandora (written in 1894, staged 1905), served to reinforce his main thesis—that the repression of sexuality results in perversion and tragedy. As Lulu the two plays were staged in London and New York in 1970. Among Wedekind's other plays, Der Marquis von Keith (1901) was revived by Jessner in a famous Expressionist production in 1920, and was seen at the Schillertheater in Berlin in 1963. It was not seen in London until 1974 (NY, 1979). Other plays sometimes revived are König Nicolò; oder, So ist das Leben (1902) and Schloβ Wetterstein, first produced in 1917 with Elisabeth Bergner playing opposite the author. All Wedekind's plays, with their sex-ridden men, women, and children, their gentlemen crooks, and their grotesque yet vivid cranks, typify the feverish spirit of the years before 1914.