Frank Wedekind wrote the 1904 drama Pandora’s Box, a play that influenced later adaptations. Wedekind was a German playwright whose works often challenged social conventions and explored sexuality, power, and hypocrisy.
Pandora’s Box is the second of two plays centered on Lulu, following Earth Spirit. The Lulu dramas present a provocative modern figure whose relationships and social encounters expose the tensions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European society.
The play later became especially famous through G. W. Pabst’s 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box, starring Louise Brooks as Lulu. Alban Berg also drew on Wedekind’s Lulu plays for his opera Lulu, which premiered posthumously in 1937.
Wedekind’s title deliberately invokes the ancient Pandora myth, but the drama is not a straightforward retelling of Hesiod. Instead, it uses the mythological image as a framework for a modern story about desire, repression, scandal, and social judgment.