The Yellow Wallpaper
★★★★★
Five Star Pick
★★★★★ Five Star Pick
This darkly atmospheric dance thriller takes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story and turns its interior horror inside out through movement. The unnamed narrator, confined to a room after the birth of her baby and diagnosed with a “hysterical tendency”, becomes a study in claustrophobia. The piece builds a nightmarish atmosphere, switching between exhaustion, delirium and hysterical ecstasy as her grip on reality slips. While the gaudy greens of Victorian wallpaper were infamously produced with arsenic-based pigments, it’s the very sight of the eponymous yellow damask that becomes the focus here.
Although the show incorporates good chunks of spoken text from the source material, the effective staging and expressive movement make the emotions legible even without the words. Her husband is styled with nuance and tenderness, oscillating between protector, carer and smotherer, never a cartoon villain, which only makes his control more unsettling. His sister (a scene stealer whenever on stage, with more than a dash of Rocky Horror’s Magenta) becomes increasingly villainous and sexualised, in charge of both the baby and, it would seem, the husband, in ways our central character is either not able or allowed to be. The ensemble dancers are a highlight of the show and function as muses, externalised fragments of the narrator's psyche, surfacing and receding as her condition worsens. The choreography, like the narrator, returns obsessively to the paper as the dancers become the pattern, creeping, caged, fungal and sickly. It's a smart theatrical solution to a story that, on the page, is almost entirely interior monologue.
An unexpectedly caustic, camp Fourth of July sequence punctures the show as a turning point, both deepening our empathy for the narrator (haven’t even the sanest of us had one of those horrific ‘grin and bear it’ situations?) and marking her shift from largely present and fighting her demons to wholly, and gleefully, consumed by them.
What elevates this beyond a straightforward period piece is how it reaches into the present; the production is at its strongest when it balances the two kinds of imprisonment Gilman writes about: the literal barred nursery and the prison of the narrator's own mind, each feeding the other in a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. The history of women being institutionalised, ‘rest-cured’ and disbelieved sits at the story's core. Gilman herself drew on her own treatment under a leading nerve specialist of the era to write it, and while the production itself makes no such nods, I couldn’t help thinking of Britney Spears' conservatorship, the ongoing conversations around medical paternalism and the ways in which contemporary ‘wellness’ can be performed and imposed.
By its end, this is not just a ghost story about a woman losing her mind in a locked room; it's a gripping and emotional hour of dance-theatre that suggests the ‘hysteria’ diagnosis and the impulse to silence women deemed too much never really left. Hauntingly staged, sharply danced, and quietly furious underneath: highly recommended.
★★★★★
