Tilly No-Body Tickets

In 1906 a 19-year-old actress called Tilly Newes was given the role of Lulu in a Vienna production of Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, the second part of a two-part play which had attracted considerable scandal. There had been attempts to ban the play, and Wedekind and his publisher were prosecuted for what was deemed its immoral content. 

Wedekind had already known public scandal. He had been forced to flee Germany after the publication of Spring Awakening in 1891, a furious, groundbreaking play about the appalling consequences of sexual ignorance on a group of teenagers. 

Wedekind’s stories of Lulu—the femme fatale who brings sexual ecstasy but also death to her lovers and who meets her own end at the hands of Jack the Ripper—caused further opprobrium. In the Vienna production he himself played Jack the Ripper. He was in his early 40s. Shortly after he and Tilly wed. 

It was not a happy marriage. Both Tilly and her husband were prone to depression and came from families in which suicide was common. Wedekind was enormously possessive of Tilly but also provocative. Guests to the Wedekind household were often seated opposite a nude portrait of Tilly. But male compliments aroused anger. Wedekind thwarted his wife’s career. When she married him, Tilly Newes was on the path to becoming somebody. Wedekind turned her into a nobody.

Bella Merlin’s Tilly No-Body, which opens at the Arcola Theatre this week, after an Edinburgh run last summer, reclaims Tilly’s story and brings her out from under the shadow of Wedekind. It gives Tilly the chance to return to the stage in her own right, not merely as the wife and muse of the famous writer who influenced those who came after, including Brecht. 

'It is essentially a dream play,’ explains Merlin, who has been working on the piece for over 15 years. “It takes place over the three days when she had booked herself into a hotel and taken poison and was unconscious.” Designer Kerry Jones has created a deserted circus environment, one which echoes Wedekind’s interest in the circus, a form for which he had undying enthusiasm.

Tilly survived taking mercury, although she suffered severe internal burns, but she lived into her 80s, long surviving her husband, who died shortly after her suicide attempt. Despite continued mental illness, Tilly went onto write an autobiography. Merlin translated that autobiography, which she says was the place where Tilly was making sense of her life. 

But Tilly No-Body goes beyond the biopic and a portrait of a woman of whom few people will have heard.

“During the show it is as if she is unpacking and asking the question, 'How did I get to this point?' and that’s something we all do in our lives when we think back and reflect on choices we have made," says Merlin. She explains that it took a year for the mercury poisoning to make its way out of Tilly’s body via her skin. 

“By the end of that time she had a new skin.” The show reflects that sense of being reborn.