Photo by Hugo Glendinning 

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman adapted by Stephanie Mohr – Coronet Theatre, London

Stephanie Mohr’s production of The Yellow Wallpaper locates us inside the head of the woman who narrates Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 novella. The story, an important piece of proto-feminist writing, describes the experience of post-partum psychosis from the perspective of a woman who has no agency over her life. Her husband, a doctor, knows what is best for her and keeps her confined to an attic room in a rented house, where she loses her grip on reality as something terrifying begins to emerge from the patterns in the wallpaper.

The production cleveryl expresses us the duality in the narrator’s mind by combining performance and dance. The narrator is played by French actor Aurélia Thiérrée whose part is faithful to the text of the novel. Her portrayal is both frail and powerful, drawing us into her world. What lifts this beyond a one-woman show is the staging. Surrounded by ropes, some monstrously fat, scattered nursery toys and hanging garments, Thiérrée is lost in a world of impediments placed in her way – and in the paths of many others like her – that have infiltrated her mind.

She is also haunted by Fukiko Takase’s silent dancer, projected for much of the show onto the rear wall. The audience enters the theatre through an adjacent room, bare except for a bed, where her movement is filmed. She rolls and writhes, showing the narrator’s mental confinement, but begins to morph into the sinister ‘creeping’ woman who moves in the ‘foul’ wallpaper. When she emerges, arching, bending and running low across the stage, there is a real frisson of horror. The production is perhaps too dependent on video effects that do sometimes seem basic, but the concept is highly involving. This kind of European work, combining traditional acting with movement and dance, is to be cherished on the rare occasions when it makes it across the Channel or the Irish Sea.