FringeReview UK 2023
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Coronet Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, American Theater, Ballet, Dance and Movement Theatre, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Historical, International, Mainstream Theatre, Multimedia, New Writing, Performance Art, Physical Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
It’s a novel of silences. Scraping silences perhaps. So when Stephanie Mohr’s adaptation – and direction – of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 pioneering feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper erupts in sounds and sour airs at the Coronet Theatre we might recall what Strindberg was writing then, in all its claustrophobic intensity.
It’s a remarkable manifestation (no other word seems more apt) of the Gilman, an important realisation of a key feminist awakening. It’s good enough for you not to want it depicted in any other way.
Adapted and Directed by Stephanie Mohr, Set Design by Stephanie Mohr, Lighting Design Eduardo Strike, Sound Design Mike Winship, Video Consultant MJ Holland.
Till October 7th
Review
It’s a novel of silences. Scraping silences perhaps. So when Stephanie Mohr’s adaptation – and direction – of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 pioneering feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper erupts in sounds and sour airs at the Coronet Theatre we might recall what Strindberg was writing then, in all its claustrophobic intensity.
If Strindberg – or more importantly Swedish dramatist Victoria Benedictsson who inspired him and Ibsen – had adapted Gilman, maybe this is what she would have come up with: given Mike Winship’s noirish sound design to play with, and MJ Holland’s videography – literally the living wall and wallpaper, but not in itself yellow, but stark white. Sonically there’s a touch of H. P. Lovecraft in Winship’s sudden shutting sounds, noises from the Id, baby-wails. It’s synched with blackouts in Eduardo Strike’s elegant lighting design: which has to balance video lighting with stage, and gradate realities.
Allowing the unnamed woman’s narrative a dramatic agency gives more than agency, it lends a truth to her inner world; a world riven by post-partum depression that Gilman knew intimately, and perhaps depicts for the first time: certainly with devastating authority. But to limit and pathologise The Yellow Wallpaper would be complicit with what it fights against.
Typically for the Coronet, it’s a multi-disciplinary vision, realised by absorbing nearly all the senses. At first we’re invited to enter quietly round the back of the stage to where a bed’s set up, long before the performance.
Aurélia Thiérrée is the young mother mewed up by her apparently well-meaning physician husband John in a large isolated country house in New England they’ve taken for three months. The woman’s confined to a large room for her own good, surrounded by the eponymous, loathed, yellow nursery wallpaper she wants to peel off.
Yellow wallpaper and the 1890s come to mind: the colour of the Aesthetic Movement taken from French novels (the actual Yellow Books came in 1894, only reinforcing the colour), featuring for instance in Dorian Grey from 1891 and known to Gilman. The binary of infantilism and aestheticism is a collision Gilman knows will invoke unease in her readers. Cleverly, there’s no yellow here. It’s all white, and in the upstage white enclave when the video’s not working, Thiérrée scrawls frantically.
Thiérrée’s not alone on the stage. Behind her jumping frantically, rolling round a bed and sensing along walls, is the trapped figure of choreographer and performer Fukiko Takase. Until she isn’t. Takase’s own balletic echo of the narrative involves contemporary dance in expressive and elongated gestures, crouching cats and a gallimaufry of tiny moments of despair that convince you she’s Thiérrée’s double. Her secret sharer, not a figment.
Punctuating alien sounds a baby’s cries pierce like an alien presence altogether. No matter, the nurse Jenny has her. Thiérrée’s sometimes miced up, sometimes isn’t. There’s a reason for this as we discover.
Mohr’s use of the Coronet’s horseshoe stage is curious, and initially makes less sense than any haunted narrative. There’s no bed here till Thiérrée drags on a mattress: it’s confined to the video, trapped in its wall. There’s a covered object, later revealed in a theatrical coup; all sorts of rope which finally makes complete sense of what had looked like a rope-tackle room. Thiérrée hides her notebook from offstage John under a canvas strip that bisects the stage space diagonally. Ten drags it out and starts tearing it (the woman’s forbidden to write, wants to and doesn’t). Gilman’s story is realist in details, expressionist in narrative. So realism’s eschewed and not all the stagecraft lands. But we get it.
Swedish Benedictsson might not have lived to dramatize Gilman, but Gilman gives us more than a prophesy of Stockholm Syndrome, fully realized here by Mohr. Indeed John’s voice electronically synchs with Thiérrée’s at an unearthly moment of possession and complicity, which doesn’t last. Both revolt and reactive complicity tussle to and fro in Thiérrée’s absorbed performance.
We move from relatively straightforward language through obsession, sudden eddies of realism as the woman deals with the outer world in John or Jenny, or in sudden thoughts about the lease coming to and ended and the servants departing. Then absorption in that wallpaper, the loathing and stripping, and possession as the wallpaper strikes back. It’s zig-zag, no easy progression, no pat diagnosis of psychosis. And there’s another element to recognize.
At another extraordinary moment Takase becomes real walking out and finally, lovingly combing Thiérrée’s hair with her fingers. The climax needs to be seen.
Occasionally words are occluded in a rasp and delivery I couldn’t quite make out, but this is minor and could be adjusted. And inevitably not all details of choreography might synch states of mind, but I really don’t care. It’s literally absorbing.
Notwithstanding minor vocal tweaks this is a remarkable manifestation (no other word seems more apt) of the Gilman, an important realisation of a key feminist awakening. And a strong combination of choreography with video acting and sonics to map fissures in our consciousness. It says ultimately, don’t look at the woman, look at you. Especially to patriarchy.
It’s good enough for you not to want it depicted in any other way. And it could only happen at the Coronet, continuing under Anda Winters’ inspired singular vision.
